


Dimmuborgir

by NoFootprintsInSand



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, Around The World We Go, BUT THERE IS MAGIC, Captivity, Dubious Consent, F/M, History, Humanity, Murder and Mayhem, No Magic As We Know It, Possessive Tom Riddle, Power Imbalance, Roadtrip To Hell, Rough Sex, Tom Riddle is His Own Warning, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Very AU, What makes you human?, Will add tags as I go, Worst Treasure Hunt Ever, myths and legends
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:40:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28432563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoFootprintsInSand/pseuds/NoFootprintsInSand
Summary: He steps straight out of the shadows one late autumn evening, but she is not afraid.At least not at first.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Tom Riddle, Hermione Granger/Voldemort
Comments: 117
Kudos: 192





	1. Iceland

**Author's Note:**

> All my thanks to itsjustsilver for planting the suggestion for this story in my brain and also for looking through this first chapter for me. Much appreciated! x

* * *

**Dimmuborgir**

Chapter 1: Iceland

* * *

He steps straight out of the shadows one late autumn evening.

She is on her way home. There are cars and buildings and other people. That treacherous safety found in civilisation, in the constant proximity to other people, even if they aren't actually near. The white noise of a large city humming all around her.

She is coming up the old stone steps from the embankment when he moves from darkness into the even pool of light thrown by an ornate lamppost. There is the massive white stone lion, there is the river. Then there is him, appearing suddenly at the top of the stairs, looking down at her.

She is not afraid.

At least not at first.

She ascends another two steps before she falters, stops, realises the man above her isn’t moving. He’s just standing there, right in her path, but she’s not worried. There is, after all, nothing threatening about neither his stance nor countenance. Indeed there is a small smile playing on his lips, even if his eyes lie in shadow. He appears finely dressed, well kept, slight of build and average of height. Not a threat, supplies her logical mind, and she takes another step up the stairs towards him.

“Can I help you?” she calls out, still not concerned, but perhaps something small starts stirring in her hindbrain. Because she is close enough to him now that she ought to see his face clearly in the streetlight, but it is still painted in claire-obscure. She gets the sense of high cheekbones, bird wing brows, a full mouth with a severe slant to the Cupid’s Bow, but the light doesn’t hit him right, seems to shatter on contact with his skin.

“Hello,” he says to her, and she can see his mouth stretch wider, a true smile now. Straight white teeth. Sharpness. “Yes. You will do. You will do quite nicely.”

With that he takes one step down towards her, and she finally sees his eyes.

She goes cold. Tingles in fingers and toes. Her heartbeat loud in her ears. Flight instinct takes hold of her. Ancient. Primeval. Adrenaline with nowhere to go. Her hand scrabbles for the stair railing, and she finds weak solace in the solidness of chilled metal as she slowly begins backing down again. Step after step downwards, carefully feeling for purchase with her feet, because even though she is desperate to turn and run, she doesn’t want to take her eyes off him. Doesn’t want to give him her back. 

Each step is mercilessly matched by the dark man as he follows her down, and her body can’t ever recall terror such as this.

“What is your name?” asks the man, a lilt of laughter to his voice.

“Hermione,” she answers automatically. Throws it over her shoulder in the leap, the vowels of her name hanging in the air she used to occupy. Because she has turned, and she jumps the last five steps down, sending leaves whirling, pigeons high up in the air.

Then she runs.

He lets her get quite far. Far enough that she actually believes herself in with a chance. A calculated cruelty of course; soon enough she will come to understand that about him.

“And you can call me Tom,” he murmurs as he catches her, grasps her arms and pulls her back into himself. A grotesque mockery of an embrace. His arm across her chest and his lips against her ear as he uses her own momentum against her to swing her back around. Her handbag slides from her shoulder and falls to the ground. She struggles against his grip, but he is entirely unmoved as he half carries, half drags her back towards the large staircase. The lion grows in her vision, enormous above her, so very white against the hazy night sky, solid and lifeless.

Not once does she think to scream. Later she will wonder why.

“I remember that this beast used to be red,” he murmurs while nuzzling her curls. It’s a peculiar aside that she doesn’t hang onto in her fright, because it doesn’t make any sense, because it was over fifty years ago that lion was painted red.

She’s got just enough time to realise that he’s pulled her back into the deep shadow of the lion’s plinth, then they are gone.

Everything disappears around her. The city lights, the black taxis, the red buses, the boats on the river and the clocktower on the other side of the bridge; it all swirls into a noxious whirlwind. She at the centre of it, tugged every which way, there is no solidity except the man at her back.

Screams are blowing in the air around her as she is ruthlessly wrenched through space, atoms and molecules split up and then put back together again. The pain of the transition is white hot, her nerve endings raw and exposed. Her thoughts are stripped bare of anything but a conviction etched deep into her bones: she won’t survive this. 

Then she’s spat out on the other side, and she falls down onto ground that is uneven, rocky; no longer the smooth paving stones by the river Thames.

Even though she’s on all fours the vertigo in stillness is merciless, and she vomits, her whole body seizing up, cramping. She breaks her nails and bloodies her fingers clawing at the stone underneath her as she attempts to ground herself, hold on to something solid and real.

Eventually, her heart slows, her head stops spinning. Her retching lessens. A mixed blessing, because now, when her body is no longer trying to turn itself inside out, she grows very aware of the temperature.

It's cold. It’s _freezing_. She’s in a dress and tights and ankle boots, and a trenchcoat suited to the autumn temperatures in London, a city warmed by a lid of pollution. Here, the air feels arctic, the wind easily penetrating clothes, skin, bones. Her breath is billowing around her in frosted clouds, and her teeth begin chattering immediately.

She stands. Brings her torn fingers into her pockets to warm them. Looks around.

The man that brought her here is a little ways away, moving away from her at a brisk pace. She spins, tries to make sense of where she is, see if there is help nearby. Buildings, people, vehicles. 

There is nothing. 

The landscape is so _other_ that she at first, quite hysterically, thinks he has brought her to a different planet. But, she’s intimate with stars, and so she tips her head back and sees that they are the same above her. Familiar constellations, nebulas in their rightful places. A waning gibbous occupying the same slice of sky as it did back in the city.

But there is nothing familiar about these vistas. Desolate, stark; black ground with powdery snow being constantly moved about by the wind. There are no trees, no vegetation. Off to the sides and behind her she sees snow-capped peaks at the horizons. And just ahead…

Something like dark towers and turrets rise up above them. Twisted and torn, jagged, broken. Meeting the star-strewn heavens with haughty impunity, their darkness of a quality so solemn as to drain the night sky of its living energy. 

She’s never seen anything like it. 

The disquiet she feels as she studies those queer formations is bone deep. Instinctual. A conviction coming from a place deep within her that she never knew existed: something enormous happened here, a long time ago, something…. 

She looks around again, and back. Desolate nothingness. No life that she can see. The only other human here is the man that somehow brought her to this place. She’s shaking from the cold and she’s terrified and nothing makes any sense, _nothing_ , but...

_Better the devil you know._

She runs to catch up with him.

She reaches his side just as he begins walking in among the dark structures and pillars. He glances sideways at her and his smile is openly mocking.

“Not that hard a decision, was it?”

“How did you do that? Bring me here? I was in London. I was on my way home, I…”

“Hush,” he interrupts, “your gabbering will give me a headache.”

She falls quiet, but only because her attention becomes wholly stolen by the dark, wrought shapes surrounding them. Her eyes are wide as she tries to make sense of it all, take it in. 

Mythology in petrified shape. Raging fire turned to stone. A black hell-scape imbued with primal beauty and ancient rage. The stars flickering far above it all, too far away, too cold and too aloof, to be the comfort to her that they would usually be.

She’s walking on snow and lava.

They move in between two leaning spires, ever deeper into this place, and it gets darker, the towers and pillars crowding in above them. Moonlight can barely reach them here, and with a quiet mutter he raises his right hand. A little ball of light begins to dance in his palm. It doesn’t appear to burn him, but gives out a warm glow, causing shadows to flicker off the formations around them.

“What are you?” she murmurs through stiff lips just before she tries to break from his side. The hand not holding the light shoots out and grabs her by her wrist, pulls her back to his side with a cruel twist of fragile bones.

“I am just someone who wants to go back home, little one.” He stops then, turns to face her. He looks at her, truly _looks_ at her, and it’s terrifying and it’s mesmerising. His eyes, once again shaking her, urging her to _run_ , but there is nowhere to run _to_ , and he is holding her too hard. “And you are going to help me. Are you not?”

“I don’t know what you mean, who you are, but if you take me back home I promise I won’t tell, I won’t…”

“Come.”

He ignores her words entirely, but his hold on her wrist remains vicious as he urges her to keep walking. The snow has started to seep through the fine leather of her boots. The wind blows cruel little ice crystals up into her face, whips her cheeks, her brow. Her steps falter, from exhaustion, from the uneven ground, and several are the times she stays on her feet only because of his grip on her.

He, the man, _Tom, he said his name is Tom_ , he seems entirely unperturbed, untouched by weather and exertion. She glances at his profile, partly obscured by his upturned collar; the straight nose, the shadows thrown by his cheekbones, the facets of midnight in the corner of his eye.

“Where are we?” She can barely speak now, the shatter of her teeth so severe that her jaw is hurting. She’s lost feeling in her fingers and toes, the tip of her nose.

“You call it Iceland,” he murmurs, obliging but distracted, his attention on something in front of them. He stops, and lifts his hand high, the little ball of light dancing merrily on his palm. In the flickering illumination cast she sees crumbling steps raising in front of them, crudely eked out in the suspended lava. They lead up to…

She strains to make sense of what she’s seeing.

A perfectly shaped, domed archway. An _entrance_. She tips her head back, and Tom raises his hand higher, and an impatient flick of his wrist sees his fey light burn much higher too. Brighter. She gasps at what she can see, discern.

A fallen dark citadel shrouded in moss and snow and time, a broken, gnarled church. Whispers, so many many whispers. The betrayal of nature is at its greatest here, she senses; this is the very point of origin of the event that long ago rearranged this landscape forever.

She turns to him, looks at him voluntarily. No wonder the moon shines so dully here, she thinks: its light slides off of him, and she’s cold, so cold.

“I don’t...no. No. Please.” 

She doesn’t even know what it is she’s begging him not to do.

He hushes her, nearly croons into her ear as he ushers her up the slippery, uneven steps, and he’s almost gentle. His breath on her neck though, his hold on her, promises violence in a fraction of a second should she choose to resist, go against him.

Once they are right by the entrance he releases her. She stands in front of that gaping maw, and her terror becomes something living; fingers over her jugular hampering her breaths, teeth in her spine, tongue lapping at her marrow. A harsh wind is blowing outwards at her, whipping up ever more snow in her face. Snow crystals clinging to her eyelashes, her lips. The force of the wind tells her that this is a cave wide open through and through, straight out on the other side.

With the positioning of the space high up on the rock face she should be seeing the sky, the stars on the other side. She should be seeing Orion, the Seven Sisters, Sirius. 

She sees only darkness. Dull, impenetrable, thick enough to almost touch. And beyond it, _inside_ it…

Tom walks through the high gothic arches as she begins backing away, heading for the steps down. Even over the wind she can hear his footfalls echo, indicating high ceilings, a space much larger than ought to be possible. She knows, she is more certain than she’s ever been of _anything_ , that she does not want to see what the light in his hand will show her.

“I really would not,” he calls to her without turning around. His voice is greatly amplified by the cathedral space in which he stands. “There is nothing and no one but us for many miles, and you are not dressed for these conditions. You would freeze to death out there, and be of no use to me at all.”

She’s starting to think that death might be preferable to whatever it is he has in store. She has reached the first step, is preparing to hurtle downwards and take her chances, when he comes back for her.

There is nothing faux-gentle about him now. He grabs her hair in the leap and she howls in pain when he wrenches her backwards and spins her in the movement, slams her headfirst into his chest. Then he pulls her head back so that he can see her face, brushes flyaway strands of her hair out of her eyes as he _tsks_ at her.

His light is hovering cheerfully by his shoulder, she sees.

She tries to avoid looking at him, but he won’t have it, gets her chin in a grip that will leave a wreath of fingerprints behind. Forces her to meet his gaze. Light blues bleeding into greens, and that pinprick of crimson deep in the blackness of his pupils that had sent her running back in London. The noctilucency of his irises devouring stars, bending their light _wrong_. 

He suits this landscape, that’s what he does, with the white of his face and the black of his hair and his northern light eyes. He looks like he belongs here.

She, on the other hand, she needs to get the _fuck_ away.

He doesn’t quite seem to agree. He smiles at her, and it’s savage, vicious, beautiful. He looks like he enjoys her struggles, the way she thrashes against him.

“I know you are hurting, little one. I know you are cold. Soon it will be over. Soon you will not have to hurt, or freeze, ever again.”

With that he forces her by her hair back to the arched entrance. There he kicks her legs out from underneath her, sends her falling heavily to the ground by his feet. He stands behind her, and uses her hair to wrench her head back, exposing the frailty of her throat to the enormous black space, the whispers inside. 

His knees hard and sharp against her shoulders and chanting ricocheting in the air above her head. 

She doesn't know the language. It’s like nothing she’s ever heard before. It sounds as archaic as the lava formations surrounding them. His voice grows with it; echoes, booms, curls. His words seem to rouse the wind ever more, it rises and whines around them, and his language clings to it, ascends with it.

And, this chimera of wind and words also winds itself around something inside of her.

Nestles around her spine, her ribs. Forces something awake, something she’s never felt before. Something dormant, but now it comes into cognisance, yes, it stretches, arches its back, then pushes up, outwards. Up her oesophagus, out her eyes and mouth and nose. It hurts, and she screams with it, screams and screams until her voice breaks into tiny little pieces.

And it gets darker, much darker, and she thinks maybe it emanates from him. Something of jet and pitch, stygian, rising high above them, enveloping them both from behind.

His voice reaches a crescendo then, a fearsome resonance of command and puissance. It’s so forceful it heaves her forward, and only his grip on her hair saves her from cutting her face open on the uneven ground. His voice rings out with a final howl, it feels as though it ought to move mountains, tear this whole place apart...

A fat lot of good it does him. Absolutely nothing happens. 

She can feel how the wind settles back into something natural, the air around them lightens into night. His angry swearing is definitely in English, the frustrated tugging on her hair very human.

“What’s wrong?” she eventually asks, even though her voice is broken, even though she doesn’t care, because she’s pretty certain she’s about to die from pain or hypothermia or both.

He crouches down behind her, and she can feel his cold sweat freezing to ice against her cheek as he leans forward and whispers in her ear.

“Let us just say that this will be slightly more complicated than I had anticipated. I need more...ah, _keys_. More keys to go home.”

His voice is faltering, raspy. The words are not being shaped quite right in his mouth. Exhausted, she thinks, he’s exhausted. Whatever he attempted to do here has drained him, sapped him of strength.

But she has no idea what he’s talking about, whatever it is he’s doing, and she’s distracted, confused. Vaguely she attempts to recall what she’s read about hypothermia, and she wonders how long to unconsciousness. Minutes? Seconds? 

She would welcome it.

“You are slipping away, are you not? A fine pair we make.”

He clasps her shoulders with that, and from his hands emanates warmth. It spreads outwards from the points of contact, out into her limbs, into her chest, her heart. It rids her of all the cold, regains the feeling in her finger and toes. Her teeth stop chattering, her mind clears.

So he really does need her alive then.

“You fucking bastard,” she says hoarsely but clearly, “you could have done this from the beginning.”

He chuckles lowly.

“Easy now, little one, and do not distract me. I have barely enough strength left to get us both out of here.”

Then he moves even closer to her, wraps his arms around her from behind, and she realises too late what he’s about to do.

Her _no, don’t!_ is the only thing left behind as the two of them disappear, the words falling flat to the frozen ground.

  
  
  



	2. Egypt

* * *

**Dimmuborgir**

**Chapter 2: Egypt**

* * *

“I want to go home.”

“I want you to be quiet.”

She doesn’t like his face in sunlight.

It doesn’t suit him, illumination. It shows far too much, but somehow not _enough_. She’s unable to explain it, other than that it brings too much attention to the darkness in his light eyes. Brings out the imperious cruelty nestled in the fine lines around eyes and mouth. 

He’s older than she had first thought. When he caught her in London she had thought him to be barely out of his teens. But she can see now, in the light, that he is much older than that. She just can’t say by how much.

There is the faintest hint of silver at his temples, just barely, as if his thoughts had become too much to be safely contained inside his head. Like they had at one point violently burst forth and left a touch of gossamer behind. Then, there are those lines by the corners of eyes and mouth; very fine, delicately drawn. His movements, on those few occasions he walks across the little room, are easy, smooth, but terribly calculated.

But mostly, it is in his eyes. They are...they are _old_. She can’t describe it, can’t put her finger on the notion long enough to pin it down and inspect it, but... there is something ancient nestled at the back of his gaze, something inherently _knowing_.

There is old rage too, and mockery, and haughty disdain. _Pride_.

It’s too difficult to meet his eyes, and so she avoids it. 

He seems perfectly content with that.

She thinks maybe three days have gone by cooped up together in this room. A small bed, a table, two chairs, some hooks on the wall. Tiled floor and faded blue window shutters. She’s still wearing the same clothes, but lost her trench somewhere between here and Iceland. No matter. It’s warm, and the air terribly dry.

He hasn’t told her where they are. She hasn’t seen him sleep, or eat, or use the shabby, awful little bathroom attached to the room. Her own sleep, when it comes, is fretful, broken, and plagued by nightmares. She will wake to food of dubious provenance, but delicious in its simplicity. Sticky dates. Sheep’s milk. Soft flatbread and herb-scented honey. Once, a richly scented stew. 

He, he has been sitting in the window seat, in the light from sun and moon, since they arrived in this hovel. 

It’s the only window, and he’s not disposed to let her near it, but she can still see. She can hear. She can see the conical roof of a minaret in the distance. She can hear the call to prayer. First one at dawn, last as darkness is descended. _Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Magrihb, Isha._ She can see ochres and taupes and blues. Terracottas. She can hear Arabic floating through the window of the little boarding house, chatter and calls from what she thinks is a nearby market. Sometimes the wind will bring through the open window a sense of brine and the faint echo of sea birds.

He hasn’t said much. Her few attempts to plead, converse or demand have all been met with impervious silence and she’s about stopped trying. She’s getting the sense that this coiled placidness is him regaining his strength: a depleted predator waiting for full power to return.

Still, he’s certainly strong enough to harshly put a stop to escape attempts. She knows because she’s tried.

She is struggling. 

Her mind, by nature busy and insatiably curious, is unaccustomed to idleness, inertia. She’s used to solving riddles and problems, diving deep into narratives and research, but she can’t solve _him_. Perhaps because her mind is also entirely pragmatic and sober, and this man, there is no labelling him with a prosaic, natural explanation. 

He teleported her from England to Iceland, then to here. He called forth a flame to light their way. Then, he did something, she still shivers to think of it, at the mouth of that arched, ancient entrance. Something that brought down darkness on them both. She had heard...she had seen…she had _felt_...

No. No.

She is forced to admit that something supernatural is afoot because the alternative would be that she is insane.

And that is unimaginable. Unthinkable. Hermione Granger is _not_ insane. 

She might be heading that way though, thanks to a peculiar amalgam of ennui and fear. So too a strange feeling inside, a restlessness, an itch. Something scratching from within the birdcage of her ribs; talons on bone. Something wanting to get _out_.

It’s making her feel quite wretched.

“Why am I even here?”

Wretched enough to attempt to talk to him again.

“There is something inside you that I need.”

She hadn’t expected an answer, but he speaks to her now, without looking at her, his attention ostensibly caught by something outside the window.

“What?” Though of course she might have an inkling. Had it been information he no doubt would have attempted to wrench it from her by now. And she’s under no illusions of her ability to withstand torture, nor does she doubt his willingness to administer it. 

She thinks of the coldness of his eyes, and pulls her dirty dress closer around herself.

If it’s not something she’s got in her head then it must be something else, and she suspects that whatever it is is rather crucial to her continued survival.

“What do you… I don’t understand. I’m no one special. I really am not.”

“Oh, you have no clue. No clue at all, do you?” He stands from the window seat, walks over to her where she sits on the bed. “The blood that courses through your veins is from the beginning of _all_ , but you...“ He sneers, upper lip curling “- you are nothing but a pathetic, sniveling girl.”

He picks a strand of her lank hair, twines it around his finger while she stays as still as a mouse. He looks at her like he’s trying to find something, _anything_ , in her that is worthy of regard. 

By the way his mouth twists she’s coming up short.

This is the first time he’s touched her since he put his arms around her on Iceland and transported her to this room. She makes the mistake of looking into his eyes, and she sees those pinpricks of crimson again.

They appear larger.

“What are you? You are...you can…” her mind searches for a suitable term, can’t find one and eventually throws out “- you can do _magic_.”

He releases her, abruptly, and turns around. 

“Go to sleep,” he tells her over his shoulder.

She obeys, exhausted from going absolutely nowhere.

* * *

When he wakes her again afternoon light is bathing the small room, making the space look dreamy and golden rather than tired and shabby.

“Time to go.”

As he puts his arms around her and makes them both disappear she can hear _Asr_ being called from the minaret.

* * *

“I abhor heat,” he states.

They are walking towards sharp mountain peaks. She wishes the déjà vu would also include a frigid breeze, perhaps some snow, but no, they’re in a desert. At least this is late autumn heat - she suspects that in high summer this place would be completely unendurable.

“Well then, let’s leave,” she mutters. He might dislike the heat, but his alabaster skin is entirely untouched by the sun, whereas she can feel her own equally pale complexion going an angry red. “Just do that thing you do. Go _poof_.”

It’s a testament to how much she’s suffering that she would voluntarily subject herself another of his transitions. She’s still barely recovered from arriving in, and leaving, Iceland. She vomited again when they appeared out here, viscous bile and half chewed dates onto ochre sand, and then his half disgusted, half bored face in her peripheral. 

“No. There is something here that I need.”

“To go “home”?”

Her tone is mocking. Whether he’d intended it or not, he’d made it clear that he needs her alive for now, and so she’s pushing boundaries. He seems to allow it for the moment, but his eyes flash mordantly as he answers.

“Yes.”

She stumbles over a jagged rock. He makes no attempt to help her, and she manages to right herself before she goes down.

“Where is _home_ , exactly?”

“Would you not like to know.”

She rather suspects she wouldn’t.

“What then, is it that you need?” she tries instead.

The look on his face tells her that he sees straight through her attempt. Then he jerks his chin forward.

“There. Our goal.”

She stops, shields her eyes against the low sun, squints into the distance.

At first she sees only the uneven, jagged mountain chain, golden in the waning sun. She doesn’t understand what it is he’s indicating. Then she allows her gaze to sink lower, and with some effort she picks out big buildings in the shadow of the mountain. Same colour as the granite towering overhead, as the sand surrounding it. Byzantine. Smooth stone, tall fortified battlement walls, pillars, towers.

“Saint Catherine’s monastery,” says Tom, then begins walking again.

“Saint Catherine’s?” she says and hurries after him. “But why are you...what...the library! You want the library!”

She catches up with him and he looks sideways at her.

“You know of it?”

“Of course I do!” she huffs. “I’ve got a first in history from Oxford! I took more courses and Special Subjects than anyone else in my year. Saint Catherine houses one of the oldest existing libraries in the world. The only older is the one in Fez.”

“Well done,” he murmurs sarcastically.

“I didn’t know we were in Egypt.”

“You did not need to know,” he says with a shrug.

She tries to gauge the distance they’ve got left to cover. 

“You couldn’t have gotten us closer?”

“No,” he says shortly.

“Why?”

He actually rolls his eyes, and she thinks it a strangely human thing to do. Then she wonders why she would think like that because what else can he be but human?

“I took us as close as I could. There are certain places that resist my... _magic_.” The wave of his hand tells her that is hardly the word he considers appropriate, but that he goes with it for her sake. “I have to walk in, just like anyone else.”

He disabuses any further questions, and they walk in silence. Darkness is falling fast once they reach the high walls, and she thinks that’s exactly how he wants it. How he planned this. 

Of course, with a setting sun and deep shadows comes the sudden, startling cold of a desert dusk, and she bitterly regrets wishing for cooler temperatures earlier. She wraps her arms around herself, tries to bring as much warmth as possible to her body. Her dress is filthy, her tights are worse, but they’re her only defence against the persistent chill as Tom quietly takes her through the open gates.

She is led between buildings as darkness falls. She is scared, and she is cold, but her eyes are big and struggling against the dusk as she tries to take in as much of this ancient place as she can, at the same time as she is keeping an eye out for other people. 

Help.

He notices.

“Do not even entertain the notion,” he murmurs softly without looking at her. “I swear I will make you regret it.”

They slink past the Church of the Transfiguration with its bell tower, the Well of Moses and the monastery museum. His pace is brisk but careful, and he seems to know his way, familiar with the staircases, the twists and turns and passages. 

“We’re allowed access after dark?” she asks when they eventually step inside the library. His mocking sideways look is answer enough. 

She looks around as they walk in among the shelves. It seems empty of other people. There are no lights, but the moon streaks in through a few windows, illuminates the whitewashed walls and dark wooden shelves, the mezzanines, the reading tables, the nooks, the crannies.

It’s not what she can see, though, it’s what she can _sense_.

Because the space they walk now is...it’s full of _noise._ Tactile noise, she could almost reach out with her hand and touch words hovering in the air. 

She can feel the history suspended in stone, granite, mortar, in parchment, vellum, gilded details and ancient languages. She forgets, just for a moment, that she is a captive, that everything she’s ever thought solid is, in fact, quicksand. 

Because this, this is extraordinary. The knowledge contained within these walls...the tales, the mythology, the legends and the lies and the truths. She can _hear_ it too; trapped acoustics and vibrations, words and phrases, a susurrus, a wind. It finds purchase within her, nestles in among her ribs: the very same place where the awareness awakened in Iceland lives.

Next to her, he makes a sound deep in his throat that she would probably label as incredulous.

“This moves you.”

“Of course,” she breathes,”how could it not? The wisdom here, the history…I just...I…”

“You little fool,” he says lowly, but with sharp vehemence. “”Wisdom”? You know nothing, nothing at all. You think anyone but the victors write the words, the stories? Everything in here are enormous lies wrapped around tiny grains of truths. _Everything_.”

She neglects to answer him, preoccupied instead with this enormous treasure trove of knowledge thickening the air in here, whatever he might think of it.

A monk’s black cassock hangs forgotten over one of the reading chairs, and she picks it up and wraps it around herself like a blanket, tries to ward off the chill in her bones. Tom moves deeper into the large space, into a dark section of the library that smells of old wood and incense, dust and ink. She sees him walk straight past the leafs of parchments of the Codex Siniaticus, ignore scrolls and sheats of papyrus, diptychs; such wealth of history that her head is spinning.

They are not what he’s after though. Rather, in the very darkest nook of the library he stops in front of a large, ornately carved Byzantine chest. It’s locked, but he waves his hand, the lock clicks open and she can add yet another piece to his repertoire of deeds that ought to be impossible.

“You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

“Many, many years ago,” he answers, a faint tinge of amusement in his voice, like something is funny; a private joke. She rather suspects she doesn’t want to be privy to it.

From within the chest he brings out a large cover of black leather, cracked and faded, the letters unintelligible. When he opens it she sees parchment sheafs loosely bound inside. There are several, and there are gilded details gleaming like jewels as he flicks through them. But there is something about the object, a creeping, scratchy feeling that sees her taking a step back.

“That’s…” she scrambles around for the right word, can come up with nothing more appropriate than “…it’s _dark_. What is this doing in a Christian monastery?”

He shoots her glance.

“You can sense the nature of this work?”

“Of course,” she says, and shivers. “It’s obvious.”

In fact, she’s struggling to stay still. There is a worry in her body; a trembling, a tightening. She feels too small for her skin, there is kinetic energy leaking through newly formed cracks, static electricity vibrating between her fingertips, in her hair. Something reverberates from deep within that place in her ribcage and she wants to step closer again, run her hands across the black cover.

She takes another step back instead.

The way he is looking at her is half thoughtful, half impatient.

“Perhaps your heritage is not as dulled and diluted as I had first thought.”

“My heritage? What do you…”

“Quiet now.”

And he casually rips the sheafs loose from their cover. He ignores her outraged gasp and conjures that ball of light, that jolly little flame. He suspends it in the air above his head and holds the first sheaf up towards it, and she can see the faint scratches of old text underneath the new, which is itself very old.

“Palimpsest,” she whispers. “I’ve read about them. Lost languages. Lost cultures.”

“That is right,” he says, distracted. “And lost information most of all.”

He studies it closer, turns it every which way.

“You can read it?” she asks.

He snorts.

“I speak and read many languages. Dead ones, and alive. Now, do not bother me. Keep silent. And…” he grabs her arm, and she tries to jerk backwards at the coldness of his skin “- stay close. You do not want to know what happens if you wander out of sight.”

He releases her, his attention returned to the sheafs, and she chooses a leatherbound work at random, takes a seat at a reading table and opens it up. Escapes into the illustrations, into the shape of the writing in what she believes is Syriac. Wanders her own mind, worn and exhausted as she is, uncomprehending. Her thoughts are slippery, and it’s hard to grasp them, separate out the tangled strands and study them. 

_What is going on? Who is he? What does he want? How can she escape?_

She loses track of time. Moonlight streams through the window directly above and moves across the ancient library; without it she would be entirely lost as to where in the night she is. 

Her focus is entirely on the book and its vellum pages, on her desperate situation, and so she doesn’t notice at first that he’s turned to her. That he’s studying her with a queer sort of regard, smoothing his gaze across her profile as she’s bent over the old book.

“So tell me, distinguished history graduate, what do you know of the King Arthur legends?”

She stares at him for a beat, confused, tired. But the academic in her, the ambitious over-achiever, can’t help to relish this somewhat familiar subject, a gun trench in which she might feel safe. 

“That’s precisely what they are. Legends. If King Arthur ever existed it was hardly as a noble knight, but perhaps a Celtish chieftain. Won a few battles against the Saxons, that’s all. No knights, no round table, no Merlin. All of that was added by Monmouth, then Malory, then Tennyson. ”

His smile is wide, mocking, like he knows something that she does not but is enjoying her feeble attempts to regain some ground.

“And the cup?”

“The cu… You mean the Grail? The Holy Grail?”

He nods shortly, and she shakes her head.

“More legends. Fables. Supposedly Joseph of Aramithea collected some of Christ’s blood in a chalice, where it formed into a red gem. He, for whatever reason, then travelled with it to Britain, where it was lost. King Arthur and his non-existent knights spent a few tales attempting to find it. Never did.”

“Is that so?

“Yes,’ she says, sure of herself, and also tired and filthy and lost. “Where are you going with this? The Grail isn’t real. And if such a thing ever existed it certainly never went near King Arthur, if _he_ existed.”

He smiles at her, a sanguinary smile, a silent warning as sharp as a razor blade.

“You think the holy grail will help you “go home”?! Are you insane? Are you completely _insane_?”

She’s having to quench hysterical laughter as she considers that she might have been forced to accept that magic exists, teleportation and conjuring and whatever other occult skills he possesses, but apparently her line is drawn at the grail being an actual historical object.

She suspects that all her lines are about to be redrawn, again and again, in fact erased entirely, but even so….sod the holy grail.

She actually does laugh now, but he acts as if nothing, as if she’s an unruly child whose outburst is best ignored.

“ _One_ of the things I will need, yes,” is all he says. Then: “We are leaving.”

* * *

  
When they step back outside, onto the monastery grounds, true night has fallen. Witching hour, she thinks as he leads her towards the gate and suddenly she gets the first real chance she’s had since he stole her away in London: a monk is walking slowly towards the basilica.

She doesn’t hesitate. Not for a second. 

“You must help me!” she calls. “This man is holding me against my will!”

And she runs from her captor’s side, fleet of foot and desperate, streaks across the courtyard towards the monk. Tom’s low growl follows her, but she can’t hear pursuit.

The monk turns towards her with the sound of her voice, the surprise written on his face clear even in the moonlight. His eyebrows raise at the cassock she’s still wearing, but his hands come out to steady her when she reaches his side. He says something in Greek, she doesn’t understand it, but she hears the question in the soft vowels. He’s holding a small golden icon in one hand she sees, as she grabs his free hand with one of her own.

“Please help me,” she repeats, tries to tug him along with her, away from the dark man. Inside anywhere, away from here. 

To safety.

The monk resists her efforts though, dark eyes concerned but wary. He’s asking a question again, she can tell, but he’s not moving, and she needs him to _move_ , because when she looks over her shoulder there is Tom walking towards them.

His pace is leisurely. Unhurried. 

It terrifies her.

“We have to go, we have to run,” she urges the monk, and she can hear how wet her voice is with tears, can feel how her breaths are coming too fast.

“This was very foolish of you, little one,” Tom says softly as he reaches them. “Very foolish indeed.”

She tries for defiance, because there is nothing else.

“What, you think I haven’t worked out that I’m not supposed to live through this? What have I got to lose?”

“Oh, you are adorable.”He steps closer to the monk, and smiles at him. “You see, it’s not about what _you_ have got to lose. It’s what _others_ stand to lose each time you decide to pull a stunt like this one.”

He says something to the monk in Greek, voice melodic and clear. The effect of the words is instantaneous: the man takes a step back, clutches at the large crucifix he carries around his neck. The white of his eyes is showing as he holds it out on its chain towards Tom. He fumbles with his other hand, grabs hold of her and pulls her half behind himself, tries to protect her with his body and his faith. 

And he prays, fervent words in Latin and Greek.

It doesn’t dissuade Tom.

He takes the last step, and slowly, almost tenderly, he reaches into her would-be Samaritan’s chest, through flesh and sinew and bone. In a violent geyser of blood he comes out with the heart, and he looks at her. He smiles, such a beautiful smile, otherworldly, and as the monk falls to the ground between them he presents her with the still beating organ, blood dripping from his clenched fist. 

“Here, Hermione. You doomed him, and so his heart belongs to you.” He brings it closer towards her, making her gag on the iron tang. She staggers backwards, and she can hear her own heart beating wildly in her ears. 

Or maybe it’s the one in Tom’s hand.

He sees the look on her face, and he laughs. It’s genuine and delighted, wondrous, boyish, but she hears it from afar. Her vision is darkening, things are becoming hazy and soft. Distantly she wonders if she is dissociating, entering a fugue state in order to protect her mind.

He won’t allow that

“No? You do not want the heart you have earned through treachery? Very well.”

And he drops it into the dirt, tramples it with a booted foot as he steps over the monk’s body on his way to her. He grabs her chin with his stained hand, and he is freezing. The contrast between his frigid skin and the warm blood on his fingers makes her want to vomit, and it brings her right back to herself.

“Don't you ever do such thing again,” he whispers. “You are re under the impression that you can walk away from me. That you have agency. _You do not._ I spent an age trying to find you - do you truly think I would ever allow you slip through my fingers?”

She mutely shakes her head, but she doesn’t know if she is responding to his question or denying everything that just took place.

He chooses to interpret it as the former.

“Good girl. You will remain by my side until I’m ready for you to fulfil your purpose.”

Then he gently thumbs arterial spray from her cheek.

“Now stop snivelling and clean up. We are going to England.”

  
  
  



	3. England

* * *

**Dimmuborgir**

**Chapter 3: England**

* * *

When they appear at the outskirts of the small town she is faintly proud of herself for not throwing up.

Perhaps she’s getting used to his unbearable mode of travel.

Not vomiting over her own feet is a pathetic victory though, one that pales in comparison to the panic and terror gripping her. She’s still wearing the cassock, and it’s black, and so she can’t see the blood. But she knows it’s there. And she can certainly still see the monk’s empty eyes and his gaping mouth as he fell to the ground. She can see the ragged cavity left behind after Tom plucked his heart out of his chest. And that’s it. That’s all she can see, trapped inside an awful tunnel vision of chasmal agony.

As from a great distance she is becoming aware that she is pulling at her own hair and that she is hyperventilating.

And Tom is calling her name.

She is unable to respond, even had she wanted to. She’s held fast in crippling fear and denial, her heart beating in an abnormal rhythm, her breaths whistling in her ears. She can’t bring herself outside of it, she’s stuck in the middle of it all.

She doesn’t know how much time passes. Probably only a few moments, because he is not a patient man, that much she has learnt already.

He slaps her. There’s the shock of his ice cold hand against her cheek, the stinging pain, and just like that she snaps out of herself. Looks at him mutely as she pulls the cassock from her body and throws it down onto the grass. 

“There you are,” he says. “Pull yourself together. This is tedious.”

He toes the cassock with a black booted foot.

“And this is stupid. You will freeze.”

“I want a bath” she answers. “I want fresh clothes.”

_I want his blood out of my hair._

He looks her up and down, upper lip curled.

“Agreed. You reek.”

“And I want a hairbrush, and I want a drink.”

“A hairbrush, at least.” He eyes her snarled hair with distaste. “I think dormice might have begun nesting in there.”

She ignores him, looks around. 

They’re standing in a field, lush, despite the time of year. There are cows, watching them curiously. Clear skies. Gently rolling hills, flanked by trees in coppers and golds. The sun is at about midday, she thinks, squinting at it. It glints off shingle and slate roofs nestled further down the valley.

“Glastonbury?” she asks with a raised brow.

“However did you guess?” he answers drily and starts walking down the hill.

He doesn’t look to see that she’s following, but she’s certain that the punishment will be swift if she tarries, or if she simply runs in the opposite direction.

“Crap,” she mutters, and rubs her arms. He’s right. She’s freezing without the cassock.

She leaves it on the ground and hurries after him.

* * *

They walk down the high street of Glastonbury, and the look on his face is one of deep contempt. She can understand him. 

The town is very old and very pretty, suffused with history - she can see many signs pointing towards the ruins of the ancient Glastonbury Abbey - and myth. Unfortunately those myths have attracted precisely the sort of people one would imagine.

Hippies, she thinks with a derision that might even rival Tom’s. New agers, neopagans and crusties with dogs on strings.

Pretty much every shop on the high street sells healing crystals and incense, tarot cards and cauldrons. Celtic design jewellery and cloaks in crushed velvet. Tat, she thinks, looking at the colourful shop fronts with names like Merlin, Scone Age and Moon Goddess. 

“You sure about this?” she asks him as she dodges yet another tourist not seeing for their camera.

“Positive,” he snaps. “There is a reason this carnival awfulness grew to be here. Underneath it all, in the ground here, in the air, there is power. Old power. And I want some of it.”

“Of course,” she says sarcastically. But she is distracted. She is attracting attention, even in this place. Perhaps not so strange, she thinks. She’s filthy, her hair impossibly snarled, she’s unsuitably dressed for the weather and she’s got her captor’s palm print plastered on her cheek. 

She glances sideways at him. He’s in all black, has been since she first met him, and with his sable hair and white skin, with his eerie, light eyes breaking the sunshine to pieces...he should stand out. But people are barely paying him any attention at all.

“I’m getting looks,” she mutters “- and I don’t want you killing anyone else. So maybe get us out of here before one of these hippies decides to rescue me from my abusive boyfriend?”

“Fine,” he says. “We will stay there.”

He nods ahead to an ancient building squeezed uncomfortable between two slightly younger ones. She looks up at it.

Clearly medieval. Lead mullioned windows and parapets, roof gables and turrets. 

“This used to be an inn for the pilgrims to the Abbey,” he says.

She looks at the old sign above the door.

“And now it’s a tourist pub with rooms.”

“Indeed.”

He leads her into the dark interior with its flagstone floor and suits of armour standing in the corners.

“Wait here,” he says and indicates one of the darker nooks. “Do not do anything stupid. I will know.”

She stays silent, glad to be out of the cold. She watches him as he approaches the reception desk. She can’t see his face, only his back, but she can see the receptionist over his shoulder. She can see the girl’s jaw going slack and her eyes go empty as Tom speaks to her. The girl hands him a key, and he returns to her.

“Come.”

She follows him up creaking stairs, all the way to the top, where he unlocks a dark wooden door and ushers her inside.

“What did you do to the girl?” she asks once the door is closed.

He shrugs with one shoulder. 

“I merely...ah, altered her memories a little. _Rearranged_. Caused oblivion where we are concerned. She will not remember us.”

She stares at him, aghast.

“So you didn’t...you didn’t have to kill that monk! You could have just…”

“Oh, but I did,” he interrupts. “I _did_ have to kill him. How else would you have learned?”

“ _Learned_ ,” she repeats tonelessly, feeling suddenly completely unmoored by the casual, malevolent cruelty of him.

“Was it not educational?”

“Go to hell,” she says in monotone, and ignores his choked laugh. She looks around. “You got the honeymoon suite?”

There’s an enormous four poster bed in dark walnut, with drapes that might have been fancy about two decades ago. There’s an armoire and two overstuffed armchairs, a flat screen tv hanging awkwardly on the wall. The low ceiling bows further under dark heavy beams, and the lead paned windows are situated up high.

She hopes there’s also a mini bar.

“I asked for their largest room,” he shrugs. “I will go out and get some provisions for you.” He jerks his chin towards a door that must lead to an en-suite. “Clean up. Stay put. If you so much as stick your nose outside the room door I swear I will rip out the hearts of everyone in this hotel, and I will make you _eat_ every single one.”

She believes him, that’s the worst of it. She absolutely believes him. She wants to sink down on the ridiculous bed and sleep until all this has gone away, but she heads for the bathroom instead. Slams the door as hard as she can; a juvenile thing to do, made worse by how quietly he closes the hotel room door after himself on his way out. 

She’s careful to avoid the bathroom mirror. She’s got no wish to see what’s in her own eyes.

It’s a relief to peel off her filthy clothes. She turns on the shower, steps under the weak spray. She uses the little bottles of complimentary shower gel and shampoo and conditioner. She washes away the blood and dust from Egypt, finally cleans the fingertips she shredded in Iceland. Then she sits on the tiled floor of the shower, knees under her chin, arms wrapped around them, and she wants to stay like this forever.

She thinks her eyes are dry, but it’s hard to tell under the warm water.

Eventually the water turns lukewarm, then cold, and she has to step out. She loiters in the bathroom though - attempts to finger-comb her hair, rubs toothpaste onto her teeth with her finger. She’s starting to calm, feel almost pleasantly numb. She’s realising that she is compartmentalising, trying to protect her own mind from the impossibilities and cruelties that she has witnessed the last few days. And that’s _good_ , that’s what _needs_ to happen. She won’t think of her two best friends back in London, she won’t think about her parents. She will look only forward, think only about surviving this. 

Finally she can’t procrastinate any longer. She wraps the hotel dressing gown around herself and steps out of the room. She’s feeling vulnerable and exposed, even though the gown almost drags on the ground, its sleeves falling past her fingers.

Tom has pulled one of the armchairs all the way up to the window, and he’s sitting there now, looking bored. He seems to have a need to see the outside, she reflects: the light, the sky or whatever it is that draws him.

There’s a pile of clothes on the bed, a brush on one of the rickety bedside tables, and some bread and cheese and fruit sitting on the high window sill.

She shuffles through the clothes. It’s clear he didn’t venture far to procure them. They’re all soft tunics and wide legged trousers with elastic waists. Bright colours. There is one long green dress with an unmistakably medieval look. He must have gone to one of the shops on the high street. She'll look either like a yoga teacher or like someone in fancy dress. Still, they are whole and clean. She won’t complain. There is also a cloak, which he must surely have found in one of the crystal-and-rune shops, and a pair of mittens. It will do here, in the British autumn. But she has no idea where he plans to take her next.

She picks up some of the bread and cheese, starts nibbling as she paces the floor. She finds that she doesn’t have that much of an appetite. Perhaps not so strange, she thinks, and remembers the monk’s beating heart in Tom’s hand.

She grasps the hairbrush instead, and fighting to pull it through knots and snarls she turns to him.

“I want to be properly kitted out for the places you’ll take me. I wasn’t equipped for Iceland,” she ignores the fact that she clearly wasn’t meant to _survive_ Iceland “- and I certainly wasn’t equipped for the desert. I want a winter coat and boots, I want a bloody shemagh and some sunscreen. And whatever else I might need. You can’t just drag me around like a dog on a leash.”

“You think yourself in a position to make demands?”

His voice is soft, dangerously soft, but she carries on.

“I think you need me, _Tom_.”

He’s backlit by the sun where he sits by the window, a halo around his head and she can’t see his eyes, but she can tell that he’s furious. Quite furious. The rigid lines of his contours are cutting viciously into the space he occupies, and she abruptly changes the subject before he can lash out.

“That’s not your name, is it?” 

He shrugs, settles more comfortably into the armchair. His voice, when he speaks, is smooth and level, but there is still a certain coiled tension in the way he holds himself.

“No. It is one I picked up on my travels, and it will do. Simple. Easy to remember.”

 _For yourself or for the people you encounter?_ she wonders, but says nothing, gathers up some clothes from the pile and retreats back to the bathroom to change.

When she comes out again he’s holding one of the sheafs from St Catherine’s up against the light.

“You stole them?” she asks, not really surprised. He’s done worse things, after all.

“Of course,” he says easily, not looking at her, attention entirely on the ancient piece of vellum.

Her innate curiosity moves her forward, towards him. She’d never seen a palimpsest in real life before she met him. And academia is safe, a haven, _her_ haven, and so she finds that her mind migrates towards it now. Settles in. The soft, almost non-transparent veils of history, the whispers of lost times: she pulls them about herself.

“Pergameme was scarce and expensive back then. It’s hardly strange it got reused.” 

He scoffs.

“Well, the monks’ stupidity have not done me any favours. They scrawled over priceless texts, the only ones of its kind.” He waves the sheaf at her, a look of abject disgust on his face. “In favour of a recipe for honey mead.”

“It takes sophisticated methods to properly glean the _scriptio inferior_. Special cameras, ultraviolet light, all that. But you can read it without?”

“I have got very sharp eyes,” is all he says about that. Then: “According to the texts the Grail is buried with Arthur.”

“At the Abbey?” she asks, momentarily beyond arguing the existence or either Arthur or the Grail. “It’s in ruins.”

“Of course not at the Abbey. Arthur straddled the rather uncomfortable line between old religion and new, but it was the practitioners of the old religion that took him away when he fell.”

“So where, then?”

“Sleep now. Tomorrow we go and get the Grail. You will see then.”

She doesn’t argue, even though it’s still daylight out. It’s clear that he wants her out of his hair for now, and she is weary. So she climbs onto the bed, burrows deep under the covers, turns her back on him and closes her eyes.

She drifts off to the dry sound of Tom shuffling the vellum sheafs.

* * *

Dawn sees them walking across the green fields out of Glastonbury.

It has been a clear night, and a fine frost is covering the grass. First light is of a shy pink, painting the ground mist that flows between the hills in dogwood. 

She’s warmly wrapped in the cloak and several layers of clothes, but she wishes she had better footwear. She’s still wearing her ankle boots, quite abused and stained by now.

She follows him, and it doesn’t take her long to realise his goal.

“The Tor? We are going to the Tor?”

“Of course,” he says without turning his head. “Where else?”

She considers the tall hill rising sharply out of the mist before them. It’s unmistakable - visible for miles around. In ancient times it had been an island; the ground on which she is walking now had been a marshy, shallow sea. She can see the tower on the peak - a remnant of a Christian chapel. She knows of course of the legends and tales attached to the Tor, but she can see nothing to justify them - it’s just an ancient hill.

She realises that he’s walking towards it as the crow flies, not coming at it from the front.

“There is a pathway, you know. I saw the information signs down in town.”

“No,” he says shortly. “We must approach from the side.”

Great, she thinks: the steepest side. She eyes it as they approach. There are subtle lynchets in the slopes of the hill; Neolithic, she imagines. She can see the summit quite clearly in the burgeoning daylight, though the base is shrouded in mist.

They begin the ascent, made awkward for her by her city boots; she slips and slides in the frosty grass. Tom climbs as if nothing can move him; sure and unerring, uncaring of her troubles.

They have reached the second lynchet when she is starting to sense that something is...off.

She can see the sun peek above the horizon of the Summerlands, but it doesn’t burn away the mist; instead the fog seems to grow thicker and rise higher. It’s become an almost living thing; writhing curling tendrils, so many shades of opaque greys and purples and blues. She’s struggling to see ahead of her, can barely make out Tom who is just a pace or two in front.

The light, too, changes. The sun is visible to her, she knows it’s there, logically, but the light still grows dull, peculiar. Dimmed, colourless.

And she can hear herself breathe inside her head, she can hear her heartbeats, but the sounds from her surroundings die away. No bird song, no crunch of her feet against the frosty grass.

“Tom,” she calls, and she hears her own voice as if through water, distorted, “Tom, what is…”

“Onwards,” he interrupts her, voice sharp yet still as muted by the mist as hers. “Keep going.”

And so she carries on, stumbling and sliding, scared. The mist grows thicker, _impossible_ , and soon all that exists is the blackness of Tom in front of her. She takes the mitten on her right off hand, reaches out, fumbles in front of her until she manages to grab hold of the back of his coat.

She holds on, and he says nothing about it.

He stops eventually, she thinks they might be on the fourth lynchet, and she is soaked through with sweat, with fear. She can feel ice crystals in her eyelashes when she blinks, and her heart beats too fast in her ears.

She moves up to stand next to him on the uneven ground when he speaks.

“About here, I think,” he says.

“What do you… There is nothing here. I can’t see….”

“Pray that I deciphered the incantation correctly,” he murmurs by way of answer. “Else we will be wandering these mists forever, trapped in between.”

The icy sensation at the very base of her spine tells her that she believes him.

He raises his arms then, open palms facing away from him. He’s not a particularly tall man, but he seems so now, growing somehow with his stance, his demeanour. 

He begins chanting, his voice loud and clear. It’s not the same language he had used by the cave in Iceland; that had been totally incomprehensible to her, this she identifies as old Celtic. She doesn’t know the words, but they curl about her, she can feel them against her skin, her eyelids, her lips. 

He finishes, and they both wait. 

Nothing happens.

She wants to break her own tension, say something about how this sort of thing seems an unfortunate trend for him. But she suspects he’d rather not be reminded of his failure in Iceland, and she stays quiet.

He breathes deeply next to her, and when she looks at him she sees that he’s sweating, that he’s pale. His pulse flutters rapidly on his neck, and she takes some small comfort in the fact that he appears to have a heart.

“We do not belong here,” he says quietly. “It resists us.”

Then he begins anew. This time he puts real force behind the strange words; she can feel it. Like a pressure against her eardrums, like falling downwards, like going through a tunnel at high speed. She can feel it in her teeth, in the back of her throat, but most of all she can feel it in that newly discovered place inside the birdcage of her ribs.

A pulsing response inside her, growing evenly outwards like rings on water. Answering him, she can feel it, but she’s helpless to control it. It reaches for him, she can almost see it in the air between them, this nebulous thing straining from her to him.

It joins, she senses how it joins, and he delivers the last word in a shout. The ground moves, and she struggles to stay upright, would have been thrown down had she not grabbed him for support.

Silence. 

It rings in her ears, that silence. Tom turns his face and looks at her. An eyebrow raised at what he can see. He says something, but she can’t hear. 

She numbly lets go of him, touches her nose, looks at her fingertip. 

A drop of blood.

The sun is rising rapidly now, painting the mist in fire, turning gossamer to fairy dance. That shivering, shimmering borderland between reality and dream, just _there_. 

Only, she thinks, with dread, with incomprehension, with burgeoning realisation: it would appear that this is not a dream.

The mist in front of them silently begins to part.

She turns around then. The mist behind her is not nearly as thick, and through it she can in short glimpses see back down to the town of Glastonbury. She can see the roofs of the houses there, on the wind she can hear cars as the day begins, as people go to work. Dogs barking, a bell chiming.

But ahead...

“Avalon,” Tom says simply, but she can tell from the way he breathes that he is in pain. This had cost him. “The Celts called it Ynis Wydryn: the Isle of Glass.”

And he walks forward through the opening in the mist, certain that she’ll follow.

She does.

There is no mist on the other side. The rising sun shines on frosty meadows, stretching far, much further than the summit of Glastonbury Tor would stretch.

Apple orchards in fallow. Oak groves. A little creek, frozen over, petrified motion.

She can see people in the distance, dark of hair, shrouded in simple cloaks. But their features are unclear to her, strangely vague, _blank_ , and they turn their faces away, quietly disappearing between the apple trees as Tom and her draw closer.

Without quite realising it she again steps nearer to him, the eerie, fey atmosphere of this place weighing on her shoulders, her crown.

He looks around, then steers her towards a very large oak grove. As they get closer she sees that it’s not a grove, but rather a circle of trees, ancient and bare with autumn.

They are surrounding a big burial mound, a barrow. 

The grass grows green and lush on the barrow. On top there is a gnarly, twisted thorn bush, flowering at this time, and she can smell the white little flowers from where she stands. Tom sneers when he looks at it.

“We are going inside,” he says.

She stares at him, then walks around the mound. It doesn't take more than a few seconds.

“There is no opening.”

“Nevertheless, we are going. You better hope that I have enough strength left, or we’ll be stuck in the turf and clay and rock.”

She considers him. He is still pale, with dark shadows underneath his eyes and bloodless lips, but there is a faint glint of amusement in his eyes.

So he is capable of humour. Of course it would be dark.

He doesn’t raise his arms this time. He simply closes his eyes, and with great intensity, his knuckles clenched, sweat at his temples, he wills an opening into existence. That’s the only way she can explain it, she thinks as she gapes at it: that he willed it.

A stone entrance. Two rough slabs standing upright, a lintel resting across them. It is low, so low they will almost have to bend double to pass through. 

Beyond the entrance is darkness.

She can feel claustrophobia setting in, palms sweaty, mouth dry.

“Do I need to come?” She can taste dirt in her mouth as she speaks.

He turns around to consider her, and now amusement is writ clear in the lines of his face.

“No. You can stay outside if you wish. You cannot leave Avalon without me, so I have no fear of you running away. But do you really want to miss out? There are things beyond this entrance that will blow your sober little mind, I can assure you.”

She considers, rocks back and forth on her heels as she tries to make her mind up. He is terrifying, and he can do impossible things, take her to impossible places, show her things she could never have imagined. But this entrance, this _hole_ , into the mound is dark and foreboding, and she imagines it collapsing in on her, burying her alive. Rock and dirt pressing down on her, crushing her, inside her nose, her mouth, her eyes.

He doesn’t give her a lot of time to decide. He simply turns, crouches down and disappears through the entrance.

She hesitates for a second, then takes a deep breath and goes after him.

It’s clear to her as soon as she steps inside the narrow passage that the rules of space and dimensions apply just as little in here as in Avalon as a whole: the passageway winds impossibly long before her, she can’t see the end. It’s so very dark, and ahead of her Tom produces his little flame. It is weaker than normal, she notes.

After a few paces she finds that she can walk upright. Tom, on the other hand, has to keep his head bowed. He moves briskly though, sure of himself, while she keeps looking back to ensure that the doorway is still open, that she has a way out.

Then the passageway takes a sharp turn, and she can no longer see back. Now there is only Tom’s faint light, and she moves closer to him, but resists the urge to clutch at his coat the way she did while climbing the Tor.

Eventually, she sees light over Tom’s shoulder, light that isn’t his. It’s faint at first, but then they come around another sharp bend and she sees a large archway ahead.

They step into the chamber together.

The light in here is of no discernible source. It appears to come from nowhere, and is everywhere, and so it throws no shadows. It’s disquieting, distracting, but even so she can’t fail to see:

In the middle of the large chamber there is what she can only describe as a small dolmen; a slab of rock resting horizontally on top of two smaller slabs. They must weigh tonnes, she thinks, how is this arrangement even possible, _these_ inside _this._

On top of the slab - the table stone, supplies her mind - rests a man.

Tom steps closer, and she goes with him, all the way up to the granite altar.

The man is almost perfectly preserved, except for what looks like mould on his upper lip.

He’s got dark hair and a russet beard. He is short, but looks strong. A high forehead, bold brows. There are swirling tattoos in blue on his hands and on his cheeks; woad, she thinks. He’s simply dressed, like that of a warrior without his armour. Tunic and pants, leather boots. A belt around his waist, and a fur-lined cloak underneath him.

There is no sign of this man’s significance, that he was once the high king of Britain, the once and the future king.

Except…

Except the sword resting on top of his body, held safe beneath his crossed arms. A bejewelled hilt elaborately decorated with fine inscriptions and symbols; she recognises that of Cernunnos, the horned god, that of Morrigan and of Epona. She sees the different phases of the moon, she sees trees and animals. The blade of the sword shines bright and sharp, even after all this time.

“He could look like this forever, if nothing breaks the enchantment,” Tom says. “The old Celts; the priestesses, the druids...they could not save him from his battle wounds, and so they placed him in... suspension. Stasis. Trapped between life and death. Ancient magic. It was their hope that he would one day rise again and drive the Christians from the isles, preserving the old religion.” He snorts. " _That_ did not happen. Instead they drifted further into the mists. Now they will not ever make it back.”

She thinks of the vague, hazy faces of the people she had seen outside, and she feels nauseous. 

“How many...people….religions...has this happened to?”

He looks at her then, strangely subdued, quiet, a look in his eyes so faraway that she can’t ever hope to follow.

“Countless, little one.”

He moves around the funereal space; not quite a crypt, something...something else. He doesn’t cast a shadow in this light, and it throws her off, makes her feel dizzy, removed.

“The man was a simpleton, of course. Brave enough, but a mindless marionette. He had a sister, on the other hand, and there was a lot of fire in her.” He looks at her with a certain dark delight. “They had a son together. Mordred.”

She ignores the fact that he speaks of these people as if contemporaries, because right now her mind can’t cope with the implications. 

“Mordred? _That_ Mordred? He was slain by his own son?”

Tom shrugs.

“Politics.”

She focuses instead on the sword, its ornate hilt resting on the king’s chest.

“Is that…?”

“Yes.” He runs a finger along the blade. “Useless. Pretty, but that’s all there is to it. As emptily symbolic as its carrier. Now, the cup on the other hand….”

He looks around.

There are several alcoves in the walls of this round space, and she can see objects in each of them. Jewels, scrolls, fine cloths, dried herbs and, in one, what looks like a carefully folded banner.

Tom disregards all of these in favour of a small chalice, so covered in patina and beaten up as to be nearly unrecognisable in its function.

He plucks it from the alcove. 

She can see from where she is standing that the chalice is entirely deformed. There is, in fact, no longer a recognisable cup as such: instead it appears welded shut, just a clump, as if it spent an age buried in dirt.

“ _That_ is the Grail?” She can hear the derision in her own voice.

“Yes,” he says, distracted “- but it’s not the cup as such, it’s…” He looks around, and then walks back over to the dolmen. With great strength and much noise he bangs the cup against the table stone, right by Arthur’s head, over and over again. 

It doesn’t take a lot. The Grail is already frail with time, and eventually it cracks.

A red gem rolls out on the stone floor.

Tom immediately bends down and picks it up.

He holds the red stone up between two fingers, allowing the disquieting light to run through it. And she can see that while the shell of it is hard, inside it is of liquid, viscous and slow flowing as he moves it back and forth.

Then he closes his fingers around the gem and when he does, power runs through her, like electricity. Her hair moves with it, and his eyes glow red. 

And on the wall behind him… a span of black shadows rise up, unfurl, spreads wide. 

...they are gone before she can properly process them.

She is walking across the floor towards him before she is fully aware what she’s doing. She is carried by an undeniable urge to...to _touch_. Tom allows her to come, a look of curiosity on his face as she comes to his side, as she reaches out...

...her fingertip touches the stone and there is a _rush_ through her body, indescribable, violent: a storm, lightning.

She breathes out a shaky breath as she takes a step back.

“You _felt_ that, did you not? Your pupils swallow your eyes. You truly are not as removed from your ancestry as I had thought.” He smiles. “ _Interesting_.”

His own eyes are languid and blown, a flush high on his cheeks, a lock of dark hair falling down his forehead. He looks like he’s just been fucking, or like he’s high.

She wonders if he would be more obliging this way, or perhaps more disposed to slipping up.

“Tell me about my ancestry,” she whispers. “Who am I? Why do you need me?”

His smile is vicious, malevolent.

“Nice try. I think not.” 

He puts the stone in one of his pockets, then approaches the dolmen again. He studies Arthur’s face for a second, and slowly reaches under his crossed arms and takes hold of the sword.

“What are you…you said it wasn’t valuable.”

Tom doesn’t answer, but continues to carefully edge the sword loose from the old king’s grip. Eventually he succeeds, pulls the weapon free and then indifferently leans it against the massive stones.

“Why did you do that?”

There’s a soft sound, like a sigh, like air seeping out. She stumbles the few steps to the fallen king, and…

His cheeks and eyes are sinking into his skull even as she’s watching, casting ghoulish shadows across his resting face. His skin seems to go increasingly transparent, over his cheekbones, his hands.

And the smell...weak still, but steadily growing stronger.

“Is he…?” 

Tom’s face is demonic.

“Yes. The enchantment is broken. He is rotting.”

“Why on earth did you do that?” Her voice is raised, shrill. “Why?”

He shrugs, and his explanation, she thinks, tells her more about him than she ever wanted to know:

“I was curious.”

She finds it so very abhorrent, the casual cruelty of his. This legendary king, this person she had dismissed as myth, had been preserved for more than a thousand years. And now, because of an act of selfish _whimsy_ , he is decomposing at an advanced rate. She thinks of the historical knowledge forever gone with him. She thinks of the people outside, lost in the mists of their ancient, dead beliefs, and she could cry.

“I hate you,” she says, and she means it. “You are despicable.”

“Adorable,” he says, and puts his hand to her lower back. She can feel the coldness of him even through all her layers. “We are going back to town. We both need to rest.”

* * *

She wakes, rolls over. 

She has slept since they came back yesterday; sometime in the afternoon, she thinks, but isn’t sure, of the same day as they left. Morning is beginning to creep through the windows that he insists on keeping clear of the drapes. 

She looks for him.

He’s in the chair, as close to the small lead-paned windows as he can come. In his lap the sheafs, the palimpsests, in his hand a half eaten apple.

The soft light of dawn bounces away from his face, but still she can see how his eyelashes throw shadows like ink smudges down his cheeks.

He sleeps.

As if he can sense her regard he stirs, opens his eyes, goes from asleep to wide awake in a moment.

There is singular silence as they look at each other. All is muffled and soft, no sound from the outside, even through the thin windows. Peculiar, as if they are entombed, enshrined. 

“So you do need to eat, sleep,” she says eventually, wondering if she can somehow use it against him. Her voice is low, as if she’s loath to break into the quiet too much.

He looks disgusted.

“Some limitations were placed on me when I was cast from my rightful home. It is quite abhorrent.” 

He stretches, stands, pulls his fingers through his hair.

“Now get yourself ready. Eat, get changed, whatever you need, only do it with haste.” The look on his face can only be described as hunger. “We are off to Russia to find a diadem.”

  
  



	4. Russia, part 1

* * *

**Dimmuborgir**

**  
Chapter 4: Russia, part 1**

* * *

  
  


They arrive after nightfall.

That throws her off. Throws her body off. Perhaps because she now can better withstand his abrupt transitions from continent to continent, she is becoming more aware that their jumps don't follow any established time differences. They left Egypt before dawn, and appeared in England around midday. They left England just after dawn; here it is dark, even though there should only be a handful of hours difference. 

She had perhaps, without quite thinking about it, assumed that his teleportation aligned with time. Now when she is faced with proof that so is not the case, she can feel the first stirrings of a fresh new panic. What day is it? How much time has passed since he first stole her away in London? She has no idea. She had seen nothing to indicate the date while in Glastonbury, she had just assumed that they arrived there in the morning following the night in Egypt. But perhaps they did not. Perhaps she is losing days, _weeks_ , to the way he moves himself and her across the world.

Never before has she so appreciated a grasp on time than now, when she no longer has it.

She turns in a circle, trying to anchor herself in a location, something tangible, now when she is unable to trust the way time moves.

She gets a sense of place only in the false warmth of sodium streetlights, but it’s enough for her to see buildings. Here neoclassical, there baroque. Grand, lavish. They stand on a wide, tree lined street, seemingly pedestrian, though she can see no people around; indicating that it is true night, not evening.

She doesn’t get the time to take a lot in; Tom ushers her impatiently towards a building he seems to have chosen at random. 

It’s palatial, the building they walk towards. In fact, she decides when she looks again, it _is_ a palace. But when he casually clicks open the large double front doors and they step inside a hallway of marble and an enormous staircase, she realises it’s a palace that has been converted into apartments.

“Up,” he says, and she follows him up the stairs, her cloak held tight about her, a pillowcase stuffed full with her spare clothes under her arm. 

There aren’t many doors, so she assumes the apartments behind are large. He stops by each one, face intent, focused, like he’s listening, but continues ever upwards. She files this with the rest of the fragments of knowledge she’s gleaned about him: he likes to be up high, he wants open views.

Finally, just as she had anticipated, he stops outside the door at the very top of the building. Again he appears to somehow listen, before he gently places his hand on the lock and makes it click open. 

He grabs her arm, and quietly pulls her inside. It’s very dark, clearly a windowless room in the heart of the building, but she gets the sense of a large space around her, high ceilings.

“What is...” she starts, but he whips around and puts his hand over her mouth. She starts, tries to wrench herself loose, but he easily holds her still against him. Her head spins with the sensation of his cold hand against her face, and that cimmerian feeling inside her rib cage flares with the touch of his skin on hers.

And the smell of him, it’s so _close_... 

Fire, she thinks, he smells of _fire_.

Burning trees. A forest in flames. Cedars and pines. Ash and embers. She involuntarily draws him deep inside herself and thinks that she will never ever forget it, the scent of him. 

“Stay quiet,” he whispers in her ear, and she jerks her head once, eager to acquiesce so that he’ll let go. He does, releases her and takes a small step back.

“Wait here.”

And he walks away, light of foot, making barely any sound despite the heavy boots she knows him to wear. It’s disconcerting, to be in darkness with him somewhere within it, to have no real notion of her own place in that space.

Then she sees the vague outline of him as he opens a door. The darkness within the room that he is entering is of a lighter shade of black than the one in which she stands; she guesses there’s a window. Even so, she sees him only for a fraction of a second, quite a way away, down what looks like a large hallway, then he steps out of view and the door shuts quietly behind him.

The darkness is once again overwhelming, but her eyes are starting to adapt. She can make out shapes, get a vague sense of where the walls might be. The front door is behind her, the hallway down which Tom went is in front. 

She hears a voice, a muffled shout, a woman screaming, bumps and bangs, and then...then there is a _change_ in the atmosphere. A renting of air, a violent maelström that she can _feel_ , before all goes still. And she _recognises_ it, even though she’s never consciously considered it: it is that of Tom teleporting. 

And she can’t _feel_ him anymore. She hadn’t even realised that she _could_ feel him until he’s no longer there. But she’s sure he’s gone. His presence is...absent.

She is alone. 

“Well, bugger this for a game of soldiers,” she whispers and spins around. This is the first time she has been left alone since he took her. She’ll be damned if she’s going to waste it. With her hand out in front of her she’s walking back towards the front door. She’s got no plan, no idea how to get back home, but first things first: get away from him.

She walks straight into him. She can’t help it, she yelps as he grabs her arms.

“Where do you think you are going?” 

There is icy delight in his voice. She tries to slow her breathing, but it’s impossible. He doesn’t seem to care for an answer anyway.

“Did I not tell you what would happen if you tried to leave me?”

“It’s so dark,” she nonsensically says in response. “- and I’ve never seen that thing you do, how you appear and disappear. I’ve always been with you, so I haven’t seen it. I wish it would have been light so I could have seen it properly.”

He laughs, and she’s not heard him laugh like that before and it’s such a strangely human sound and it doesn’t work in her head, him laughing and sounding so genuinely amused.

“And yes, I remember what you said would happen if I tried to leave. You would kill people. But didn’t you kill someone just now? So what did I have to lose?”

Tom flicks on the light. She suspects it’s for her sake rather than for his; she’s pretty certain he can see in the dark. When her eyes have adapted she sees him wearing a grin showing too many teeth. His hands are hard and cold on her upper arms.

“I didn’t actually kill them,” he says.

“You didn’t….what did you do to them then?”

He shrugs, managing to make it look _boyish._

“I just brought them elsewhere.”

“Where,” she asks even though she knows she will regret it, “- did you bring them?”

He smiles again, and _God,_ she thinks, how perfectly beautiful he is up close, with those terrifying noctilucent eyes and the way shadows fall just _right_ across his face. So beautiful and so despicable. 

“Siberia.”

She can feel herself shivering at how casually and delightedly he commits atrocities. 

“They were asleep,” she says slowly. “You took them from their bed, didn’t you, wearing only nightclothes, and you dropped them in Siberia. In November.”

“Correct.”

“So they are as good as dead. In fact, it would have been more merciful to kill them outright.”

“Perhaps,” says Tom with another shrug, “- but I did not want a mess to clean up here.”

“You are...you…” She can’t continue, because she doesn’t know what he is, and she’s got no words anyway.

He wipes at her cheek with his thumb, cold, slow, like he’s wiping away smudges of stubborn dirt. This protracted contact of his skin against hers intensifies that feeling inside of her tenfold. Now she becomes aware that it is really a _sound,_ or rather the _memory_ of a sound; a melody existing between breaths, just out of hearing range.

“ _Stop_ this,” he says. “By now, this should be nothing new. Your humanity is like a stain on you. Like mud on your face. It makes you weak, and stupid. I needed somewhere for us to stay, and I arranged it. Now this place is mine. We may have to remain here for a while and I have no wish to be cooped up in just a small room with you for the entirety of it.”

He’s still holding on to her, one hand on her arm, another on her cheek, and he’s close, far too close, she can’t think. Everything is going too fast. Too many fast jumps, too many of her convictions and notions shattered. She’s still reeling from how he brought King Arthur out of stasis just for fun. 

Still reeling from finding out that King Arthur, and Avalon, had even _existed_. 

But she knows one thing: if she is to have any chance of surviving, she needs to stop resisting at every turn and start playing along. And also, whispers a small but clear voice inside of her, if she _does_ play along she will get to experience _extraordinary_ things. Has she not spent her adult life passionately entrenched in history? As his captive she has already walked the blurred line between history and myth, and there would appear to be a lot more to come before he is satisfied. Why should she not grab it, experience it, while she is also looking for a way out? 

Smile on the outside. Scream on the inside. Grasp knowledge with both hands. And _survive._

“Well. It’s rather...much.” The jerk of her chin manages to take in the entire hallway in which they stand. Marble floors. Frescoes and intricately sculpted moldings. Faux rococo furniture and an abundance of gilded details. It can only be described as garishly opulent. “Perhaps a tad ostentatious?”

The amusement on his face at her abrupt change in demeanour tells her that he knows precisely what she is thinking and what she is trying to do, but is content to indulge her. She’d rather not speculate as to why.

“I will agree that the previous inhabitants had somewhat...loud tastes, but nevertheless, this will be a perfectly serviceable base while we are here.”

He finally lets go of her, and with it the melody inside her recedes, wraps itself snugly around her ribs in repose.

“Where do I sleep?”

He gestures her down the hallway, then into the bedroom from which he abducted the apartment’s unfortunate inhabitant. 

“In here, I guess,” he says while making a show out of putting a broken Tiffany lamp back on the bedside table, righting an upended chair.

She looks around. Same interior decoration themes as the hallway, only….more. The bed is a monstrosity, she notes with a glance, and the ceiling frescoes on the risqué side. But her attention is on the floor to ceiling window facing out over a large green space, a park, and beyond it...

A large church lit up by many many lights, lending it an otherworldly appearance. Built in the spirit of that medieval romanticism so inherent of many landmarks in Russia, with enameled onion-domes and bright colours. She recognises the church, of course.

“We’re in St Petersburg,” she breathes.

“Well done,” he says dryly from behind her. “No doubt you will proceed to tell me the name of the church.”

”The Church of Spilled Blood,” she says immediately, ignoring his sarcasm. “Built on site of the assassination of Alexander II.”

“Bravo,” he says drolly. “And now, alas, it is but a museum for mosaics. Not much belief left to permeate those ugly domes.”

“I actually think they’re very pretty,'' she says. “Like something out of a fairytale.” Then she realises she can no longer see his reflection in the glass. He’s left the room, apparently uninterested in her architectural musings. 

She finds him in one of the living rooms, sprawled across a brocade chaise lounge that looks almost as uncomfortable as it is ugly. He’s got the vellum sheafs out again, holds them up towards the large crystal chandelier above him so that he may better see the faint text underneath the current writing.

“So what now?” she asks when he ignores her presence. “What kind of diadem are you looking for?”

He doesn’t put down the sheaf, doesn’t look at her. But at least he answers

“It was one among the crown jewels of the Romanov dynasty.”

“The Romanovs? Wait. Are you going to tell me Anastasia really did survive?” Her voice is snide, but a part of her is prepared for him to say yes. A short while ago she had stood over King Arthur’s body. Anastasia Romanova having survived the Russian revolution seems positively pedestrian in comparison. “And now she’s a little old lady and you are going to rob her of her trinkets?”

“Don’t be silly,” he mocks, still not looking at her, attention wholly focused on the sheaf in his hand. “She was 17 in 1918. Even if she did survive the execution she would be rather dead by now. Rhetorical, of course. I can assure you, Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanova of Russia died in that dank little basement, as did the rest of them.”

Well. Fine. 

“How do you expect to find this diadem? Almost all of the Romanov jewels were sold for parts by the Bolsheviks.”

“True, but the diadem we seek was stolen away by that crazy, reeking monk before the revolution. He was insane, but likely he saw the centre stone for what it _really_ was.”

She ignores the “we”, ploughs on with trying to understand. 

“Crazy mo... _Rasputin_? You mean Rasputin? How do you actually _know_ all this? Those notes,” she nods at the sheafs “- were clearly written more than a millennia ago, they are a lot older than the Russian revolution. So unless they are some kind of Nostrodamus prophecies for _monsters_ I don’t see how they can tell you that Rasputin thieved a tiara some 120 years ago.”

His voice is frigid when he answers. Though he ignores the slur his tone is making clear that he is reaching the very end of his limited patience.

“These _priceless_ texts obviously do not mention the diadem, or Rasputin. But they do mention the ancient stone that I seek, a stone that I know for sure sat in a wheatsheaf diadem owned by the Romanovs.”

“But..but all of this is just wild conjecture and crazy guesses, you have no way of really knowing, it’s not like you were there and I…”

He stops reading the sheaf then. He puts it down and looks at her, gives her his undivided attention, and his slow, wide smile stops her in her tracks. 

She feels like she’s falling.

“What do you...? But you are…”

She had been about to say “too young” but she stops herself. _Ageless,_ she had thought, and ageless she still thinks. 

“It was fun,” he says quietly, “-but not as fun as Bloody Sunday.”

“I don’t believe you,” she whispers. “I _can’t._ ”

She feels ill, unmoored. Goosebumps and tunnel vision. Her hands shaking, her teeth clacking together uncontrollably. Every time she makes an uneasy truce with her impossible situation he changes everything, pushes the parameters of what she is willing to accept further and further away from her.

“I need to sit down,” she says, and more or less falls into a chair standing perpendicular to the chaise lounge.

He sighs. He sounds terribly put out.

“Come now, Hermione. When will you rid yourself of this tedious attitude? We entered Avalon, we found the Holy Grail. What more do you need to accept that there are powers and beings at force in this world that are wildly beyond your ken? Stop questioning everything. It is _boring,_ and only makes you out to be a thickheaded _materialist_.”

He snaps his fingers and from a Mazarin desk over in the corner flies a wad of thick writing paper across the room, straight past her nose and into his waiting hand. With another snap comes a fountain pen in gold from the same desk. 

She barely reacts. Summoning writing utensils like that seems the very least of it.

He sits up straight, and with a noisy screech pulls up a little pedestal table so that he may use it as a makeshift writing desk. 

“Now, Grigorij Rasputin was as crazy as they come, but shrewd enough, and he obviously knew a priceless object when he saw it. The sapphire in the diadem is of immense significance. It dates back to that cretin Moses and his silly little tablets. I cannot even hazard a guess as to how it came into the possession of the tzars and ended up in a piece of jewellery.”

He starts writing, the pen flowing easily across the paper. He appears to be taking notes from the sheafs.

“At the time, I had too much fun to care about the stone, or what the monk did with it.” The pen keeps moving as he speaks. “I had no idea that I would one day come to need it. Now I am stuck trying to work out where a fevered mind might have hidden a small object. So if you will excuse me…”

She doesn't take the hint. She remains where she is, watching him. 

His handwriting curls like smoke as he takes notes from the sheafs, his hair falling down over his forehead and she can only see the sharp ridge of his cheekbone, the shadows of his eyelashes across it. She doesn’t recognise the language in which he writes.

She’s in deep thought, but she’s moved on from Rasputin, and Tom’s insinuation that the stone he’s looking for had been chipped off one the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. She’s considering something else instead, something brought on by his touch.

“Tom?”

He doesn’t look up from his notes. 

“Yes?”

“When...when we entered Avalon, made the mist open for us...I _helped_ , didn’t I? I could feel it, inside. Something went from me to you. What was it?”

“Hermione?”

“Yes?”

“Go to bed.”

The look on his face as he stops writing and looks up at her brokers absolutely no objections, it is dark and wild and she has learnt to read him quite well already, hasn’t she?

She turns on her heel and starts to leave, then stops, looks back over her shoulder at him.

“The texts…the palimpsests..”

“Yessssss?” he snaps, his voice is a hiss and she knows she will be in trouble soon.

“In what language are they written?”

“Enochian,” he says shortly, and her heart does something funny, she can feel in her chest; how it flutters, then trashes, before it starts beating normally again. She doesn’t tell him that he’s ridiculous, that it’s a made up language.

She says nothing at all as she realises that she’s not surprised, not really. 

She walks to the bedroom, shuts the door quietly behind herself. Locks it.

Not that it can ever keep him out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This Russia part was meant to be told in the one chapter but, uh, it was getting rather long and unruly, so I decided to split it in two. The second part is coming just as soon as I’ve managed to get Tom to do as I say. Wish me luck with *that*.


	5. Russia, part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. I couldn’t get this chapter to play ball at all, and I am tired of fighting with it. So, you get it as is, so that we can move on to meatier things.
> 
> A reminder before we begin that Tom most definitely isn’t nice.

* * *

  
**Dimmuborgir**

**Chapter 5: Russia, part 2**

* * *

A couple of days go by. She is left to her own devices within the confines of the apartment. A cursory look on the first day tells her that the place has been swept clean of any phones or computers. Perhaps the rightful owners eschewed digital devices and modern technology, but more likely is that Tom made them all disappear. 

She tries not to think. That way lies madness. She puts his latest revelation, his grasp of a language that shouldn’t exist, firmly in a dark, labyrinthine part of her mind. She will have to take it out and look at it sooner or later, she knows that. She will have to hold it up to the light and see it for what it is, but not….not now. For now, it is safely tucked away.

It doesn’t help though. 

Once again she finds herself trapped in the bizarre, paradoxal grip of numbing ennui and heightened fear, and it’s wearing her down. She feels like she is becoming unspooled, falling apart at the seams. Something is happening to her, _inside_ her, something is….changing.

She isn’t all that sure she ought to let it, but she doesn’t know how to stop it.

Staying away from Tom seems to be key. A pity only that it’s impossible.

He seems to have set up camp in the living room, and she avoids it as much as she can, tries to keep herself as busy as possible within her limited means.

At first she wanders back and forth between the windows, seeing Saint Petersburg only through glass. She longs to go out exploring but is met with incredulous, contemptuous silence when she pokes her head into the living room and asks him if she may.

She directs her attention to the apartment itself. She finds women's clothes in an enormous walk-in wardrobe. Most of them are useless to her, being low-cut, slinky evening gowns and tailored suits made for someone a lot taller. But there are a few cashmere pieces, and some tops and leggings in wool and silk that she can make work. She finds a fur coat, a fur hat, fur lined boots, and she hoards it all, stuffing it into a large backpack she finds in the utility room next to the kitchen. All the while tamping down the disquiet and unease at scavenging a dead woman’s things. She needs it more, she reasons, Tom’s idea of providing her with necessities clearly haphazard at best, non-existent at worst.

Besides, the original owner is more than likely very dead.

She makes herself sandwiches of dark rye bread and hard cheese in the kitchen, drinks black strong tea as it is, because there isn't any milk. In fact there is not a lot of food or drink at all, the previous inhabitants clearly not overly bothered with keeping the larders stocked with anything but champagne. She is careful with what food there is, not wanting to run out. 

She is very tired, but her sleep is haunted and broken into sharp pieces. She is certain that she dreams, she is certain that those dreams are nightmares, but she can’t remember a thing. All she knows is that each time she wakes it’s with a beating heart and a scream at the back of her throat, trying to claw its way out.

She always bites it to pieces before it can leave her mouth, stubbornly unwilling to let Tom hear her struggling.

She finds some books. Judging by the garish covers they are romantic fiction, though it’s hard to tell for sure what with them being written in Cyrrilic. Same goes for the few fashion magazines laying about, though the pictures entertain her for a few minutes. 

So she walks. Back and forth, from room to room, window to window; caged and fretting, wretched in her inability to understand and catalogue the situation she is in.

It doesn’t take her long to reach the conclusion that there is nothing she can do to occupy herself. Hers is a flitting, restless mind to go with flitting, restless hands. Being trapped in a highly charged, impossible position doing _nothing_ tilts her askew, spins her wildly off her axis. Something is _happening_ to her and she needs to think of something _else_ while she works out what it is.

She tries not to laugh at that.

Eventually, the boredom and the uncertainty makes her approach Tom in his lair. 

So very foolish.

“I want to help.”

He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even look up, leaves her standing before him as he is bent over a thick leather-clad book with fragile-looking pages. He is looking as unkempt as she’s ever seen him. Hair standing on end, his usual high collared black jacket thrown carelessly on the floor, the black shirt underneath open by several buttons. The sleeves are pushed up to his elbows, his boots shoved underneath the chaise lounge.

She stares at the alabaster skin of his neck and chest, at the strong, elegant shape of his forearms, and she thinks that this is the most she’s seen of him, and she doesn’t _like_ it.

“Well?” she prompts.

“I think _not_ ,” he tells her, voice bored, but his movements almost jerky, uncontained, a dully glowing sort of anger about him. He’s riled, she thinks, he’s annoyed. He mustn’t be getting anywhere in his search for the sapphire, the frustration making him display unusual emotion.

Perhaps she could use that. For what, she isn’t sure.

She looks around while she is trying to think of a new angle, and she sees what she should have noticed as soon as she entered the room: there are books everywhere. Books and papers and piles of old notebooks.

“What is this? These weren’t here before.”

“Your powers of observation never cease to astound me.”

“Did you go out?” Her voice is raised, but she can’t find it in herself to calm down. A part of her realises that it is of course ridiculous of her to be angry that her captor is afforded more liberty than her, but that part is small. “Where did you get these?”

“Borrowed them from a collection at the Winter Palace,” he says lighty, and in a way that ensures she knows that he hadn’t “borrowed” them at all. Then he correctly anticipates her next question: “I nipped out while you slept. I would have woken you, but,” his smile down at the book is vicious, “- well, you seemed to dream so _sweetly.”_

She goes cold at this, his insinuation that he knows of her nightmares. Then she thinks one step further, wonders if he directly caused them in order to keep her trapped in sleep while he was out.

She decides that for the moment, she’d rather not know. Cowardly, perhaps, but right now she needs to divert her own attention, not focus it further on her absurd situation. So instead she sits down on the little chair and reminds herself of her resolution: play along. Learn. Experience. Then get the _fuck_ out.

“I’m an academic. Research and reading is what I do. I could help.”

He’s still refusing to look at her, and it’s antagonising her; her fingers are itching with the need to... _something._

“Oh? So you can read Cyrillic now?” he mutters.

“Well,” she hedges. “I could learn. I am a very fast learner.”

He scoffs, turns a page, speaks to the letters on it, not her.

“ _Bored_ , are you?”

Fucking... _fuck._

“ _Yes._ Yes, and I can’t bear it,” she tells him hotly, even though she suspects, no, she _knows,_ that she oughtn’t expose any more weaknesses to him.

“Too bad,” he drawls and turns another page. 

She wants to pick up the old book and hit him right in the face with it. Instead she again tries to distract herself, and learn more at the same time too.

“Rasputin...was...was he really _holy_? Did he have spiritual powers? Could he have cured the tzarevich Alexei?”

A week or two ago she would’ve dismissed the notion entirely. Now...now she’s not so sure.

Tom throws the book he’s reading down with a sharp bang, making her jump. He picks up another book and flips it open with unnecessary force. She considers leaving the room, but braces herself and stays. He’s already said that he won’t kill her.

Yet.

“He was crazy,” he says sharply, “and he was charismatic. A very potent cocktail when it comes to gullible people desperately wanting to believe. And he certainly convinced Empress Alexandra of his abilities. But no. He was not _holy._ ” 

He spits the last word out as if it’s a grievous insult.

“But according to trustworthy historical sources Alexei did get better. And hemophilia was an incurable disease back then,” she says, playing devil’s advocate.

“Rasputin persuaded the boy’s mother to keep the doctors away, because in his fevered mind only the divine could cure the boy. The doctors treated him with aspirin. What is one of the properties of aspirin, Hermione?”

“Well, it thins the...Oh.”

“Indeed. A happy accident, not that it did any of them any good in the end.”

“Fine,” she says. “But you are still certain that he stole the diadem?”

“Yes,” he answers impatiently. “The man had rather sticky fingers. The diadem was not the only thing he helped himself to from the vast possessions of the House of Romanov, but it was certainly the most valuable. Priceless, in fact.”

“And he didn’t... sell it on? Pawn it? You’re sure?”

“The last time it was seen was some weeks before his death. He was wearing it on his greasy head as he danced atop a table in a tavern of some disrepute,” he says drily. “Very drunk, he was. Amusing.”

At her nonplussed look he shrugs.

“Guess you had to be there.”

She shivers, and casts about for a change in subject. She picks up a pile of leatherbound notebooks, sorts through them one after one.

“Ah, here’s one written in French,” she says triumphantly. “I speak fluent French.”

“Splendid,” comes his muttered reply.

She looks closer, squints to better read the fussy cursive in which the diary is written.

“Oh! This is a diary of Princess Irina! Tzar Nicholas’ niece. She was married to the man responsible for killing Rasputin. Yusupov.” She flips some pages. “And this seems to be written about the right time! 1916, 1917. Perhaps some information, clues, could be found here. You know, Irina’s family spoke more French than Russian, so it’s hardly strange that she would write her diary in French. I suppose it had the added bonus of servants and others in her orbit not being able to read her secrets.”

She is aware that she is sounding like a swot, an insufferable know-it-all as one of her dour Oxford tutors had once called her, but knowledge is safe. Everything else has been taken from her. Her world-view has been carelessly tossed into the air, and she is helpless to do anything but watch the pieces glint in the light on their way down. But her knowledge is her crutch. It’s what she leans on when she’s flummoxed, scared, out of her depth. History and her grasp on it; it is there, it is tangible, it is unchangeable.

….isn’t it? 

Well, _fine_ , maybe not. But she is being given the opportunity to add to it, explore beyond the outer limits of what she always thought she knew.

And anyway, he ignores her chattering completely.

She falls silent at last, loses herself in the day to day minutiae of Princess Irina Alexandrovna. Her bemused preoccupation with her toddler girl. Her musings on her complicated husband. Her view on the politics surrounding her, and what she’d like for lunch today. Hermione doesn’t know how much time passes, can measure it only by the turning of pages and the movement of daylight across the room, the breaths of her and Tom, curiously aligned.

Finally, something catches her interest.

“Oh!” she exclaims. “This is interesting. Here is a passage dated at the beginning of December 1916. That’s just a few weeks before Rasputin was killed. Irina writes:

_“I saw that awful man again today. He came to visit Felix, and I could not very well leave immediately. He was sitting downstairs in the salon, staring at me with those queer eyes of his, drinking our best wine and throwing that wretched stone from hand to hand. Eventually I had managed all the pleasantries I could stomach, and excused myself to go see to Bebé. I believe he left not long after.”_

She puts the diary down, looks at Tom.

“Irina must mean Rasputin, right? And the stone could be the stone you’re looking for. That means he somehow took it out of the diadem.”

“I know,” says Tom. “I already read that one.”

“Oh.”

She’s deflated, but not ready to give up and leave him alone, and she realises she is now skirting the real reason she voluntarily approached him, has spent time sitting in here with him even though he clearly wants her out of his sight.

“Who...cast you out? From your home?”

He stiffens, she can see it only in her peripheral because she is careful not to fully look at him. She thinks he will refuse her question, perhaps even hurt her for daring to ask, but when eventually he speaks it’s in a very even, bland tone of voice. 

Too even. Too bland.

“My father.”

She finds that she is not surprised. Perhaps she had guessed as much, even though she doesn’t want to acknowledge it.

“What is your father like?”

She does cut her eyes to him now, and she can’t ever begin to desciper the look on his face; there are too many elements to it, and all of them unstable. Rage, most definitely. Something she might have called sadness, had he been someone else. Perhaps longing. Surely vengefulness. When he speaks though, his voice is just as flat and measured, his eyes reined in and held tight.

But she can still hear a vibrating note of...something….something _indescribable_ in the tone of his voice. 

“He styles himself a benevolent, wise old man. Twinkly eyes, grey beard, grand gestures. He is much loved by his subjects, his acolytes: _blindly_ loved.” His voice lowers. “But he...he is really the most manipulative, ice cold strategist there ever was. Kills scores, just _swathes_ of people, on whims unknown to anyone but perhaps himself - for the “greater good”. He abides no objections or questions to his rule. He is a craven, and a hypocrite.” 

He looks at her, smiles a lopsided smile.

“At least _I_ am honest about what I am.”

She nods at him, and she thinks that she will not ask anything else of him tonight, perhaps ever.

She goes to her room.

* * *

He wakes her roughly.

She’s sleeping in a silk nightdress she found in a chest in the walk-in wardrobe, and his hands on her naked shoulder unnerves her. The touch brings on that almost-sound again, that forgotten melody just out of range, making her bones thrum. 

“I have arrived at the conclusion that we will simply have to go and dig the monk up,” he says conversationally, as if they are sitting in the drawing room making small talk about the weather.

She sits up, tries to shake sleep and confusion out of her hair and his hands from her shoulders. She succeeds only in one of those things. She looks out the window - it is dark, but she can’t tell if it’s evening or in the middle of the night.

“Why do I have to come?” she asks. “You’ve had no qualms leaving me behind before.”

“That was for mere minutes. Do you even for a second believe that I would let you out of my sight for longer than that? Besides, I thought you wanted fresh air? I thought you wanted to look around?”

 _Not around a cemetery in the dark,_ she doesn’t tell him, because she is distracted by the way his fingers move on her shoulders. Slow circles, his thumbs dipping low on her clavicle. It makes her break out in goosebumps, and she doesn’t think he’s quite aware that he’s doing it, but it’s sending soundwaves through her, it’s making her move restlessly under the cover. A whisper just out of reach, a rush far away, and there is a look in his eyes, swirling and somehow familiar, that she is trying to press down on with her finger. Keep still long enough for her to name it.

“But...there is nothing to dig up. Rasputin was burned. They exhumed him and burned him after tzar Nicholas abdicated. Scattered the ashes.”

She looks him over. He’s changed. No longer is he dressed in the timeless all black clothes to which she has grown accustomed. Now he’s wearing blue jeans, a woolen polo neck and a black peacoat. She’s got no idea where he’s acquired these clothes. She doesn’t want to know.

He’s still holding her, touching her.

“Not true. I finally found something of worth in those excruciatingly boring diaries and logbooks. It was an obscure mention in passing, but it would appear that tzar Nicholas had Rasputin’s body moved while he and his family were held at Alexandra Palace.”

“I didn’t know that. Are you sure it’s true?”

“There are a lot of things you do not know.”

She’s not even sure why she is arguing about this. If he wants her to come with him to god knows where then there isn’t a lot she can do about it.

“Leave me so I can get changed.” 

He doesn’t answer her at first, and when she turns her head she sees him looking at her naked shoulder, at his hand splayed on it.

“Tom?”

“Fine,” he says, releases her and leaves the room.

She dresses as warmly as she is able, then heads out into the hallway where he is leaning against a wall, waiting for her.

“Come here.”

He pushes off the wall and wraps his arms around her, then they are somewhere between here and there.

* * *

They appear underneath a massive tree, which is fortunate, because she can lean against it for support when he releases her. She might be getting used to transcending space, but it’s certainly not becoming more fun.

At least she gets to keep down the bread and cheese.

Tom as always seems entirely unperturbed by the transition, and starts walking away from her almost immediately. He seems convinced she will follow, and after a few seconds she does.

The snow is deep, the night is cold. She watches how her breath turns to frost and is grateful for the fur coat, the boots. 

They walk in woodland, lit up by the moon on snow. It is quiet, she can hear only the crunch of her boots. The night is pleasant, she thinks, freezing cold but no wind, and the stars appear bloated and cold between the branches above her. She takes comfort in them, in the loved winter constellations. 

“We are in Tsarskoye Selo?” she calls to Tom, who rather to her surprise stops and waits for her to catch up.

“Yes.”

“There is some stunning architecture here,” she says. “The palaces themselves, and all the buildings in the parkland. I’ve alway wanted to…”

“Yes, well, we are not here as tourists,” he snaps, and leads her deeper in among the trees. She follows silently, careful where she is treading, mindful of roots and uneven ground hidden by snow that could trip her up. She suspects he would welcome a broken or twisted ankle; it would keep her in one place.

“Here,” he eventually says. He kicks something under the snow. “It was levelled by the Nazis, but this was the site of a chapel. Empress Alexandra convinced Nicholas to move the monk’s coffin here. He actually did it himself, helped by some of the servants. Sentimental fool.”

She looks where he is indicating, and can see nothing.

“You’re sure?”

“The stone is here. I can feel it.” He turns to her. “Can you not feel it?”

“I can feel only you,” she says, and he looks sideways at her, and she could kick herself because she has said too much.

He makes no mention of it though, just does something elaborate with his finger, and a dead branch by his feet transforms into a spade. He hands it to her with an exaggerated gesture.

“Start digging.”

She rolls her eyes at the theatrics. Then she thinks about how far she has come, that she would only shrug at him transforming an object into another object, rather than attempt to run away screaming.

“Can’t you just…” She waves her hand vaguely over the snowy patch of earth he indicated.

“Can I not just...what? Reanimate him?” His eyes flare, she can actually see the crimson in them light up in the shadows. “Perhaps I could, but he has been in the ground for over a century. Not a lot left of him, I am afraid. Might frighten you.”

“I didn’t mean that! Can’t you just...unearth him?” She hacks demonstrably at the ground with the spade. “Frozen solid. If you expect me to dig we’ll be here all week, and I’m sure you’ve got better things to do. Diabolical plans to spin, and so forth.”

He sighs, and she can see him clench his fists.

“Fine,” he snaps, and raises his hands.

“I find the number of our activities that involves grave robbing to be rather disconcerting,” she says as he closes his eyes and seems to focus.

He ignores her, says nothing of her use of the word “our”. She ponders it though, how she seems to have subconsciously began to align herself with whatever his cause is. She’s always thought of herself as someone too intelligent for Stockholm’s Syndrome.

Then she stops thinking, because the ground begins moving in front of her.

She is astounded and distraught by how easily and violently he rents the earth. She believes she can hear the soil shrieking in protest at this contained earthquake, how it cleaves roots and sunders everything in its path. The worms and the woodlice, the shivers and the shakes, the _noise_. Oh the noise. 

Eventually though, a rotting coffin becomes visible. Tom takes the spade from her limp grip, easily jumps down into the hole and hacks at the lid until it falls aside.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

It doesn’t smell, the body having been in the ground for too long and well past the state of decay. But the way the grinning skull gleams in the moonlight, the way the rotted cassock hangs over the sunken bones...she has to bite her fist not to whimper. There is something so inherently dark and twisted about the scene, about the fate of this man, about the fate of his benefactors, and it all rushes at her at once, threatens to drown her and once again she is struggling to breathe.

Tom though, he’s on his knees in the casket, rummaging around among the remains without a care. She can only watch, aghast, as he finally comes up clutching a blue stone the size of an egg.

“Got it! He must have had it up his…”

“Yes, thank you,” she says and backs up a step as he climbs out of the hole. “Let’s go. Please let’s go.”

“You do not want to touch it?” he asks and takes a step closer to her, holds the sapphire up. His eyes are more red than blue and green, she sees, his grin wide and mordant. “You certainly wanted to touch the Grail.” She looks at the stone as he holds it towards her. It glints and sparkles madly, and she knows, _knows_ , that if she looks too closely into its facets she might go mad. There is an aura of blind, indiscriminate power about it, power too great for her, a pure fire that might burn her clean to the bones, she knows it just from looking at it.

“No,” she says, and averts her eyes. “Put it away.”

“Intriguing,” he mumbles, and does not put it away, he puts his hand on her cheek instead. 

She’s not in direct contact with the sapphire, but him conducting it seems to be enough. 

She is rushed. It blows straight through her, this wind of power, singes her blood, paints shadows on her bones. She can feel the place within her rib cage light up in response, and without realising it she is pressing herself closer to Tom even as she throws her head back. She is opening her mouth to scream or maybe to sing or maybe to laugh when he abruptly lets go of her.

She looks at him, and she’s panting. She can see how quickly her frosted breaths comes spilling out of her mouth, far too quickly, great big clouds of life force on the air between them. Tom says nothing, but his pupils are vast crimson eclipses swallowing the skies of his eyes.

She realises that she’s still pressing herself against him, and takes a step back.

“Where are we going now?” she asks, her voice so hoarse that she can barely speak.

The look on his face is thoughtful. Thoughtful and...rapacious.

“Oh, I think we’ll stay in Saint Petersburg for a couple of days. Deciphering the palimpsests is boring and slow going, and the apartment is comfortable enough.” He holds out his hand. “Shall we?”

* * *

He takes her back, then disappears into the lounge again, leaves her standing out in the hallway held fast by a simmering sense of unease. There had been something in his face, his heavy-lidded eyes, the way his upper lip curled… triumph, certainly, but something else too. Something hot, something restless and primitive. Something she hasn’t seen in him before.

She hesitates, considers going after him, but instinctively knows that it would be a terrible idea, that it couldn’t possibly end well for her. Instead she goes to her room and locks the door. Then she heads into the opulent en-suite, locks that door too. Thinks for a second, and drags a small, fussy linen cabinet in front of it. It won’t do any good if he for some reason decides he wants to get in, but she still feels a little better.

At least she’s tried.

Then she takes her first shower since Glastonbury, washes the graveyard dirt and sweat, ink and magic from her skin and hair and tongue. It’s a quick affair, just enough to get clean, then she gets out, dries off, and selects another expensive nightdress from the dead woman’s drawers. She crawls into bed, and she falls asleep almost straight away, there’s not even time to be surprised.

She wakes to screams.

At first she believes they are hers, that her unknown nightmares have finally grown so bad that her pleas for help are breaking through sleep into waking.

But when she sits up in bed she hears screaming again. It’s naked, primal fear beating against her eardrums; animalistic, barely human. It’s coming from somewhere outside her room, but within the apartment. Another scream, and her heart beats just as if she’s in the midst of a night terror, and perhaps this _is_ a nightmare, but of a different kind.

As she climbs out of bed she sees that it’s still night outside. Through the window the domed roofs of The Church of Spilled Blood curve against the black sky, moonlight glinting off the enamel and the brass. There is no hint of dawn at the horizon; she can’t have slept for long.

When she runs out into the hallway it is quiet again, but she carries on towards the lounge where she is certain Tom is lurking. She throws open the double doors, then cuts her forward momentum into pieces as she tries to make sense of the scene before her.

Tom is standing in the middle of the floor, and his burning eyes might be enough to wholly hold her attention, had it not been for the dead girl by his feet.

The doors swing shut behind her.

The girl is definitely beyond saving, Hermione can tell with just one glance. Her mouth is still open in a silent scream, but her eyes are staring at nothing; wide open and shattered. They are brown, notes a distant part of her, brown and empty. She lies facing the doorway, one hand stretched out in front of her as if she’d been trying to reach for it.

Hermione takes in more, much more than she wants. The thin, pale limbs. The cropped top, one breast on display above the pulled-down neckline. The short skirt hiked up almost to her waist, exposing cheap, lazy underwear. The sparkly platform heels, the childish pink of her badly painted nails. Old bruises on her white legs, fresh needle marks in the crooks of her arms. Long brunette hair, clearly cared for, in stark contrast to the drawn face, even though the cheeks still retain an element of roundness, a faint echo of lost youth. Around one small wrist hangs a charm bracelet in tarnished metal. There is a little heart, she sees, a little heart swinging from the looped chain.

“Oh dear. My apologies,” drawls Tom. “I had not meant for you to wake. A lively one, this one. Good lungs.”

She lifts her eyes, stands there stock still and looks at him over the girl’s dead body. He meets her head on, entirely unrepentant, his upper lip curling into a vicious sneer, and even when he distorts his face thus he is beautiful, she thinks. Flushed cheeks and dilated pupils, tousled hair. Eyes flashing with violent delights. 

A Caravaggio angel in jeans with blood on his hands.

“Why...what,” she starts, feeling vertiginous, desperately ill, _cold_. “Why would you...why would you do this?”

Tom throws his hands out in a supposedly placating gesture that he manages to make mocking instead. And even through her terror she recognises how furious he really is, how poorly reined.

“The need to sleep, and eat, and shit and piss; they were not the only limitations placed on me when my father forced me from my home. There are other urges too,” he tells her by way of explanation. “And it has only increased now, when I’m in such close prox...” He cuts himself off, and toes the body instead, indifferent. “Anyway. And so there is collateral damage.”

“Collateral...I...you...you kill them...after?”

His smile at her is truly monstrous.

“Oh, you misunderstand me, little one. I kill them _before._ I will not degrade myself with something so base, something so despicably _human,_ as fornication.”

From a distance, removed from herself, she notes that her breaths are coming too fast. Tingles in her finger and toes. A shrill ringing in her ears. She’s never had one, but even so she is able to recognise and catalogue the symptoms of an approaching panic attack. She can’t let it grab hold of her, she knows, can’t lose herself right in front of him. He would tear her to pieces.

“That is...Tom.. you can’t...” She struggles to get the words out, looks at the little heart dangling on the bracelet around that fragile, limp wrist. “You can’t do this. It is inherently wicked. _Evil_. Stop. Please stop.”

“You are being ridiculous. She barely suffered.”

“I heard her. I heard her screams. She was terrified.”

He scoffs.

“Maybe so, but her death was relatively painless.”

“No. No!” she chokes out, and he tilts his head, laughs.

“Oh Hermione. Since I was forced to come here I have killed thousands upon thousands of people, and likely I will kill thousands upon thousands more. Yet you wish to squabble over the one individual?”

“Yes,” she says without hesitation, bolstered by the utter conviction that she is right. “Perhaps I can’t save the thousand, but maybe I can save the one.”

“Admirable,” he says blandly. “However, too late for this one.” Again he prods the girl’s body with his boot.

“How can you do this?” She whispers, still trying to control her breathing. “How can you twist an act that ought to be a thing of closeness and beauty between two people, into something so completely grotesque? Into _murder_?”

He shakes his head at her.

“You are too tender-hearted.”

“‘Tender-hearted”? You mean human?”

“Yes. Yes, that’s what I mean. _Human_.”

He looks revolted when he spits the word from his tongue, like it’s a disgusting, rotten thing in his mouth, and just like that she loses her tenuous grip on her control.

“You are reprehensible!” she screams at him, taking a step forward. “A monster! A twisted being doing twisted things!” 

He becomes so very still. Too still.

“Be quiet.” His voice is low, even, and terrifying, but she can’t stop now. Fear and sadness and fury carry her onwards.

“No wonder you were cast out, no wonder your father rejected you! Who could possibly want such a wretched, _pitiful_ creature as you?”

“ _Silence_!”

The way he says that one word shuts her up immediately. She’s never heard anything like it from him before: it’s a command with all his power thrown behind, her teeth ache with the force of it. She looks at him, truly _looks_ , then she takes a step back.

He seems bigger. Darker, somehow wrapped in shadows. There is a singing tension, finely tuned, in his jaw, neck, shoulders. His light eyes are flat, hard, and the way his head is thrust forward, his fists clenched at his side, his nostrils flared...as he takes a step towards her she takes yet another step back, for now he is truly a predator and she is prey. She hasn’t felt this terrified since he forced her to the ground by his feet in Iceland.

He smiles a smile that is only bared teeth, like he can taste her terror on the air between them and it’s the most irresistible olfactory sensation to him. 

Another step.

“Tom. Tom, please stop.” She hates how her voice shakes, hates how she _begs_.

But he keeps coming, carelessly tramples the body of the girl on his way to her. And she, she backs straight into the double doors, and breathing doesn’t come naturally anymore, it’s a boon no longer easily afforded her. 

“Oh, _you._ ” 

He takes the final step towards her, steps into her, and there is nowhere left to go. She can feel his legs and hips and chest against hers, the coldness of him. He slowly wraps a hand around her throat, clenches almost experimentally, seems to enjoy how her pulse flutters like a moth against his palm.

“You, you think yourself so noble, do you not? Hmmm? Well then, would you offer to take their place?” His smile when it comes is a knife, and it cuts straight into her neck. “You, who I actually will not kill?”

The _yet_ hang in the air between them, ugly and bloated and unmistakable. 

She turns her face away.

“No. I thought so,” he says quietly. “Not as altruistic and self-sacrificing as you like to believe. And no act actually so “close” and “beautiful”, is there?”

He uses her own words as bullets against her, and it hurts terribly when they hit. She realises that she is crying, can feel how warm her tears are as they run down her cheeks, pools in the corners of her mouth.

“You...you corrupt everything,” she says, and the accusation is a sob.

He’s been following the trajectory of her tears with curious eyes, and with an air of fascination he touches a fingertip to the corner of her mouth. She jerks against him with the touch, with the thrum it wakes inside her, and then again when he takes one of her tears on his finger, brings it to his lips and slowly sucks it into his mouth. And then he blinks, and just like that the lethal threat drains out of him, right in front of her eyes. His hands move from her throat out to her shoulders, and he brushes them as if he’s helping her get rid of dust while his eyes go from frozen water to northern lights.

“Oh, Hermione,” he finally says, his smile full of dark glee, “ - it’s what I _do_.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Christ, the Google searches I have to do for this story...
> 
> I feel I should point out here that I do take some liberties with historical facts when I need to, in order to make the story go the way I want. In this chapter, for example, it is not correct that Rasputin was exhumed and reburied - he was, as Hermione points out, exhumed and then cremated, as the Bolsheviks didn’t fancy the site of his burial to become a rallying point for imperialists. 
> 
> Furthermore, Rasputin never stole the wheatsheaf diadem - the Bolsheviks sold it at auction in 1929 along with a large collection of Romanov crown jewels, and it hasn’t been seen since (though a beautiful replica was made in 1980). The centre stone in the diadem was indeed a sapphire, though it was a yellow sapphire (to represent the sun), not blue. I changed it to blue because I wanted it to have been chipped off from the stone tablets on which Moses delivered the Ten Commandments. These tablets were made out of sapphire (or, depending on which scholar you ask, lapis lazuli) and some say they were actual slices of Heaven.
> 
> It’s pretty certain that Princess Irina Alexandrovna of Russia never met Rasputin, even though her husband killed him. No idea if she kept diaries. Tzar Nicholas II certainly did, and in its own way it's a fascinating read.

**Author's Note:**

> Would love to hear your thoughts thus far!


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